By Michael Masterson

“If you want to be a writer, you have to write.”

I was sixteen years old when my father said those words to me. They were both kind and cruel. And I never forgot them.

The first time I can remember wanting to be a writer was several years earlier. I was eleven or twelve years old. It happened in the kitchen on a weeknight.

I had written a poem for Sister Mary Something at St. Agnes elementary school. My rhyming quatrain was titled, pretentiously, “How Do I Know the World is Real?”

I was sitting at the kitchen table finishing it off when my father walked up behind me. I could feel him reading over my shoulder. I felt anxious and embarrassed. This little thing I was making, this first poem, was being scrutinized by a very serious critic. In addition to being the man who sat at the head of the table at dinner and in the living room thereafter, my father was a credentialed writer, an award-winning playwright, a Shakespearean scholar and a teacher of literature, including poetry.

I remember my father, on Saturday mornings, hunched over student essays, muttering complaints about “virtual illiterates” and mockingly reading passages out loud to my mother that sounded perfectly good to me, but elicited derisive laughter from her. I didn’t feel at all comfortable having my fragile young poem exposed to the awesome danger of his critical mind.

It must have only been a minute, but it felt much longer. Then I felt his hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm. “You may have a talent for writing,” he said. And then he turned his attention to the refrigerator, took out a beer and went back to his reading chair in the living room.

I wrote a lot of poetry in the months that followed and I began to think of myself as a writer. I liked that feeling. But soon other interests: touch football, the Junior Police Club, and Virginia Lanzo crowded my life.

Gradually I wrote less and less. I still yearned to be a writer and so I began to feel guilty about not writing. To assuage my guilt, I promised myself that my other activities qualified as life experience, and I needed that to become the writer I wanted to be.

The truth was I never really understood what it meant to be a writer. I just knew that it was something I wanted to become. I told myself that it was okay not to write so long as I spent some time now and then wanting to be a writer.

This was the shape of my delusion when, at 16, I asked my father finally, “So how does a person become a writer?”

I will never forget his answer. He said, “The way to become a writer is to write.”

When my father told me this, he was saying two things:

• That I had lost the right to call myself a writer when I stopped writing.
• That I could regain the title the moment I started writing again.

If you spend a while ruminating on these thoughts you may find them both disturbing and liberating.

In my case, I was disturbed because what I wanted my father to say was the way to become a writer was to read books about writing and then take courses on writing and then perhaps become an apprentice to a writer and then begin writing little bits here and there and finally, after three to 10 years of education, preparation and qualification, I would somehow automatically become a writer. In the meantime, I would be a writer in training – which seemed to carry the prestige of being a writer without the responsibility of actually writing.

But my father’s definition wouldn’t allow that. As long as I was studying writing or preparing myself to be a writer and yet not actually writing I wasn’t a writer. It was as simple as that. For many years I struggled with this pronouncement and subconsciously resented my father for making it.

Lots of people feel like they can keep their dream alive simply by living in a state of becoming. “I am not yet the person I want to become, but so long as I continue to express a wish to become that person, I keep that possibility alive and deserve credit for doing so.”

My father was telling me that if I wanted to become a writer the first thing I had to do was to refuse to accept any psychological credit for wanting to be a writer. If I wanted to become a writer there was only one thing I could do: start writing.

If you really want to do something, don’t worry about qualifications, credentials and certifications, just do it.

Accepting my father’s lesson was like learning to swim in cold water — painful at first but invigorating after I got used to it. After the initial disappointment of giving up the delusion that the state of becoming a writer was as good as being one I had no choice but to jump over the becoming stage and simply be.

I did that by writing, every day. And when I learned the secret of getting up early and writing first thing in the morning – hours before other people trailed into work – then I began to really live my dream.

These days I usually get to the office between 6:30 and 7:00 and the first thing I do is brew a cup of coffee and fire up the computer. There is no better feeling than getting going, sometimes by writing in my journal but more often by tackling something tougher, like a book chapter, in the morning when the office is dark and quiet.
The best part about being a writer, I have discovered, is the writing.

Here’s a bonus thought: the best way to become something special is also the fastest and the easiest, just start doing it. Don’t wait for the proper time. Don’t wait until you’ve finished your education. Don’t insist on getting all your qualifications first. Just start doing it.

That, I realize now, was the other side of what my father was telling me. If a writer is someone who writes – and not someone who has an MFA in Creative Writing or even someone who collects a check for writing – then I could become a writer simply by starting to write! I didn’t have to take any courses or complete any qualifications or get someone to pay for my writing.

I become a writer the moment I start writing and I cease to be a writer the moment I stop. From an existential perspective, this is exactly right. If you live by this perception, nobody can stop you from becoming what you want to be and you don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval or acknowledgement. You just make a decision to become and then you become.

This idea may apply to the dream of becoming a writer, one might argue, but what if your dream were to be a doctor or a lawyer or a professional basketball player?

I’d say yes you can. If your dream of being a doctor (or a lawyer, etc.) entails getting paid for your work, then you will have to go through the officially sanctioned process. But if your dream is to do what doctors are supposed to do, to help heal people, then you can become a doctor, simply by starting to help people heal.

Before you write in to tell me how irresponsible I am, let me say that I am not advocating that ETR readers practice medicine without licenses. What I am saying is that if you want to be anything, even something that in the regulated world requires education and certification, you can become that person simply by doing the thing you want.

Don’t worry about not being qualified. And don’t worry about not getting paid for it. If you have a dream that’s been long deferred, don’t spend another day talking about what you will do one day, just do it.