#GuestPost: You Know You’re A Writer When…
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I thought I’d have a little fun today so I gave myself an hour to come up with as many different situations I could think of when you know you’re a writer. So, you know when you’re a writer when…
- Every argument you have becomes fodder for your WIP, but smarter, snappier and with you winning.
- You would rather spend time on your WIP than do work that pays more in a day than you book will likely earn in a month.
- You love every part of your WIP.
- You hate every part of your WIP.
- You know what WIP means.
- You stop a conversation mid-sentence to write down a plot point that’s just occurred to you.
- You cannot stop thinking about your novel. Ever. Even in your dreams.
- You know your main character better than your best friend.
- You have conversations with your characters in your head.
- Your friends stop asking about how your latest book’s going.
- You visit a beautiful park and wonder how you can squeeze the location into your novel.
- You’re on the suspect lists of law enforcement and intelligence agencies across the world due to your Google search history.
- Putting your feet up and staring out of the window are considered work.
- When something exciting happens you immediately create a mental checklist of how it felt, smelled, tasted, looked and sounded.
- You cringe every time you read a sentence containing an adverb, even when its use is perfectly reasonable. Including this sentence.
- You find yourself mentally editing a passage you’ve just read. In a published book. By a prize-winning author.
- You give character’s names that relate to people you know, in a way only you would recognise, then kill them off.
- You laugh to yourself whenever you read the part where the above character dies.
- Backache is a constant companion.
- You treat going to the bathroom as a reward.
- You know at least twenty alternatives to the word ‘look’.
- You growl each time you type the word ‘that’.
- You can be disappointed after writing 2000 words in a day, yet delighted on another day with just 200 words.
- You ignore every line in a flattering review except the one that starts ‘my only issue with the book is…’.
- When talking with friends, you mentally rework anything you say that ends in a preposition.
- You know every aspect of a town you’ve never visited.
- You have files full of first drafts of work – on your computer, on bookshelves or in the loft – that you will never, ever look at.
- You are the ‘pro’ in procrastination.
- You look up from your laptop after writing a particularly intense scene to find the whole coffee shop staring at you.
- You laugh whenever friends tell you they are too busy to do something.
- All of your friends think you sit around doing nothing, even when your ebook is published, yet look at you in admiration when they get their hands on your paperback.
- You cannot read your own work, even after it’s published, without editing it in your head.
- Instead of getting angry when somebody insults you, you appreciate their unique terminology and note it down for later use.
- You find yourself cursing out loud when something happens in a book / TV series / movie identical to something you’ve written months earlier but have yet to publish.
- Your friends start to worry what they tell you will end up in your next book.
- Your friends recognise conversations in your latest book.
- For every story you’re working on, there are one hundred others jostling for your attention.
- You use the same word repeatedly in a conversation over a short space of time only to never use it again.
- You look for subtext in every conversation.
- You throw a book across the room wondering how such rubbish could ever get published.
- You throw a book across the room knowing you could never write so beautifully.
- You can spend an hour editing a sentence in multiple ways to make it perfect, only to realise the final version is the same as what you started with.
- You classify reading this list as ‘research’.
- Your friends look at you funny because they’ve just read that scene in your latest book.
- You feel guilty spending time with your family because you should be writing your WIP.
- You spend an hour editing an email because ‘the pacing was wrong’.
- On bad days you include tweets as part of your word count.
- You organise a family day out so you can visit a setting for your latest book.
- You mentally divide the world into writers and everybody else.
- You know that even if you never write another word again, you will always view the world as a writer.
OK, I admit it took me a little longer than an hour (80 minutes to be exact), but that’s my list. What have I missed? What things do you find yourself doing that only writers do? I’d love to hear from you.
Number 17…that’s James Patterson.