What does it take to become a writer? What does it take to do anything new, learn a new field, practice a new discipline? I often think about this. I started writing about 5 years ago. At least, in a serious way. I always loved literature and English at school, but it’s only in the last five years that I’ve started to apply myself - do the courses, read the stories, think about writing as though it’s a wicked science problem that I’m constantly tackling. So what does it take?

Well, it’s refreshing that people can always learn new things. They say that it takes about 10,000 hours to learn any new discipline. Which, in itself, requires discipline.

When I was studying one of my earlier years of uni, I became very interested in the idea of neuroplasticity - the idea that we can literally reshape the sructure of the brain through new patterns of behaviour. This is in effect what we do through the process of writing every day.

So, working on a story this morning, I took a break and read through some quotes i’d written down from several years ago:

“The experiences of our lives leave footprints in the sands of our brain like Friday’s on Robinson Crusoe’s island: physically real but impermanent, subject to vanishing with the next tide or to being overwritten by the next walk along the shore. Our habits, skills, and knowledge are expressions of something physical…And because that physical foundation can change, so, too, we can acquire new habits, new skills, new knowledge.”
Schwartz, J and Begley S (2002), “The Mind & The Brain: Neuroplasticity and The Power of Mental Force

This is from a book on a book on neuroplasticity. When I attended a workshop three years ago the tutor passed on a fantastic article called ‘Journey With A Little Man’. Cute name and I’ve continually referred back to this gem of advice by Richard McKenna several times a year ever since.

“Learning creative writing is a process of training the unconscious. We all have in us a living something independent of that which thinks it says, “I” for the whole man. It is not enough to know it intellectually; one must also learn it through lived experience, which is quite a different way of knowing.”
Journey with a Little Man’ by Richard McKenna (published in Confessions)

Write in the mornings. Attend the workshops. Meet other writers. Speak it and write it and live it because in every single one of those acts you’re training your unconscious in the language of writing and every single story you write will make you a better writer.