In the last month I’ve had some practice calling myself an author.
It’s usually in answer to the question, “What do you do,” asked by people who see my line of boys and think surely I must stay home.
“I’m an author,” I say.
The question that inevitably comes next is “Oh. What do you write?”
And this one is harder to answer, because I don’t have anything out in the market. Yet.
I am still an author. I write books. I finish books. I am in the process of getting those books ready to sell—either through self-publishing (the Speak series and some episodic fiction) or through traditional means (a middle grade novel).
I am an author.
But sometimes I feel like a fraud.
Mostly because there’s so much I need to do, so much more I need to learn, so much experience I need to gain before I can start calling myself a real author, before I can call myself an author and start teaching other people what I’ve learned.
We can feel like before we lay claim to the title “author” or “writer” we have to accomplish this and that, we have to have publishing credits, we have to sell a book well, we have to have a certain number of books under our belt.
But here’s what I’ve come to realize:
A fraud talks about writing. An author does the work of writing.
A fraud keeps all their story ideas in a brainstorm folder for some other day. An author fleshes them out and starts writing the rough draft, even if it takes years to finish.
A fraud is all talk. An author is all work.
So if I’m doing the work of an author, then I have the right to call myself an author.
And I am doing the work. I am writing every single day, cranking out story after story after story in notebooks and on a computer screen and in every space I have in my mama life.
I am an author.
Here are the reasons we should just get over it and call ourselves an author:
1. We know what we’ve been made to do.
Even if those people at the other end of our answer look at us like we’re crazy, even if they ask about our publishing credits (because “author” to others mean we have books on the market) and we don’t have any—yet—even if they don’t believe us, it doesn’t change who we are and who we have been made to be. People have their own standard for what an author should look like. But if we’re doing the work, we deserve the title.
2. We will never feel fully equipped.
It’s taken me a long time to realize this. I will never know as much as I’d like to know. I will never have all the skills I would like to have. I will never be able to produce as much as that other person can produce. There will always be someone better than we are. This is a good thing. It means we have a teacher.
But we can become bogged down in the trenches of this knowledge (or at least I can). We can want to know everything there possibly is to know about writing a book before we do it. There’s nothing wrong with learning what we need to learn. But there is something wrong when it keeps us from creating. The best practice, the best way to become an author or a writer is to practice like one.
3. We don’t have to be the best before we begin.
When I think about people who are masters now—Toni Morrison, Phillip Lopate, Cormac McCarthy, George R. R. Martin—I have to remember that they did not always start here. They did not always start on the bestseller list. They did not always write as well as they do today. Writing well takes practice.
And if we just wait until we’re perfect, until we have our skills in line with where we think they need to be (which will never happen, by the way), we will never seize the opportunity to become an author. We must create now, wherever we are. And then we must constantly grow.
It’s not easy to feel like we’re not putting on some elaborate farce, because who in the world gets to do something as amazing as writing stories for their JOB? Only the luckiest do. Only the best. Only the smartest.
That’s a fallacy. Only the hardest workers do.
So let’s get writing.
Happy creating.
