I’m participating with fellow traveller and author, Jeff Goins.

He has challenged his tribe and fellow bloggers to put into practice “15 Habits of Great Writers.” Coincidentally, this is also the title of his most recent book. If you haven’t purchased it yet, you owe it to yourself . . . if you consider yourself a writer . . . and if you believe that you can learn from fellow writers . . . to buy it, read it, and put it into practice.

DECLARE

The word for today, the first day of the challenge, is: DECLARE.

The idea is to declare to others (and more importantly, to yourself) that you indeed are a writer.

MY DECLARATION

Long-liners are much like writers. They fish for something they know exists but can’t be seen, swimming in the depths below. They catch a fish on line and pull it in careful to ease it in and not to lose it. Then, when it’s close enough to reach, they gaff it and together pull it aboard, shouting and rejoicing. What was once invisible below is now visible on their deck.

I declared myself a writer, a fisher of the invisible,  more than a half-century ago.  I write because I’ve got something important to say to a particular group of people. I write because I want to communicate. I write because I have a vocation to write that is God-given. I was created to be a writer. I was created to speak publicly what I hear in private. I was given stewardship over a gift to hear and see what is invisible.

Writing is making visible the invisible so that others can have a share in it. Shakespeare described the process of creative writing:

And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name..

“Gives to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name” Is this what you do? Then you, along with me and others, are a writer.

The characrter of Billy Tyne (Captain of the Andrea Gail) , in the movie “The Perfect Storm” described what it was to be a sword boat Captain. At the end of his description he stares straight ahead at the sea in front of him and says, “Is there anything better in the world?”

I would have to answer “Yes . . . to be a writer.”

QUESTION: What about you . . . Have you DECLARED that you are a writer? When? How?

Related articles

• E-Book Review: You Are A Writer by Jeff Goins (fantasyfic.wordpress.com)
• Book Review – You Are a Writer (So Start Acting Like One) by Jeff Goins (bookshelfontilt.wordpress.com)