How Creative Freedom Transformed Me into a Writer
Giving myself multiple outlets brought the joy of writing back.
“I want to be a writer. I am an aspiring writer. I’d like to become a writer one day.”
These are phrases I’ve been saying my whole life. I said so when I was trying to write every day, and I also said so when I didn’t write one creative sentence in half a year.
Looking back, saying that I wanted to be a writer shifted my attitude to writing in a direction that wasn’t very healthy for me. On one side, it made me feel guilty when I wasn’t writing because I felt like my dream of becoming a writer was far in the future and I wasn’t capable of doing anything to achieve that goal. On the other hand, it also provided some sense of relief — I wasn’t a writer yet. It was fine not to be writing because it wasn’t who I was, at least not professionally. This mindset only made it more difficult for me to actually sit down and write something.
Before
Since I was about thirteen, I’ve always worked on writing projects. Sometimes I wrote short stories, but even those were projects for competitions or school. When I was fifteen, I finally finished my first big WIP (work in progress) — it wasn’t a novel, but it was a coherent story with a plot and characters I cared about, and it had over 20 thousand words. It got published in a magazine about a year later. I still didn’t call myself a writer. I won a handful of creative writing competitions. I still didn’t call myself a writer. When I was 18, I wrote my first novel that had over 60 thousand words. It was never published, and so I still didn’t call myself a writer.
What’s more, I slowly stopped enjoying writing as much. I felt like I was highly responsible for working on and finishing my writing projects, and this knowledge weighed me down. It felt more like carrying around a burden than having fun.
It’s in my nature to always finish what I’ve started working on. This has proven to be overall a very good personality trait, but it also has its disadvantages — I’ve always felt like I had to finish my WIPs no matter the cost, and it had to be done as soon as possible so that I could finally have a book published, earn some money for it and call myself a writer.
Because of this, every time I sat down to write, I worked on my WIP. I rarely wrote different things, and when I did write blog posts or poetry, it didn’t count as actual serious writing. That’s obviously silly. I never realised how my brain made no sense in this regard until I started writing on Medium one month ago.
Now
Since creating my Medium account, I’ve written something almost every day. I write Medium articles, I edit my Czech WIP, I write poetry, I work on my new big project, I write a scene that just came to my mind, or I just journal. But I write. I take action. I don’t think about writing instead of actually doing it, I don’t feel guilty for not writing because I do it in one way or another, and what’s very important, I’ve changed my bio from aspiring writer to writer.
Because that’s what I am, isn’t it? Now that I’ve earned a few dollars on Medium, I can finally be a writer in the professional sense, even if my books are still to be published in the far future. I’ve always been a writer in the essence of the word, though. I wrote a novel, for god’s sake. If that’s not being a writer, then I don’t know what is.
Whenever we write poetry or short stories or online articles or anything artistic, and we do so quite consistently (on our own terms, everyone’s practice of ‘consistent’ differs) with the intention to have our art shared or published one day, we are writers.
Moreover, realising that I was a writer went hand in hand with giving myself the creative freedom that I needed to start enjoying writing again. Focusing on just one project has always been too restrictive for me, and instead of figuring this out and letting myself write whatever I felt like writing at the moment, I stopped doing it completely. My main WIP has been stagnating for over a year now because I was too exhausted from forcing myself to focus on just that one project, and so I preferred not to think about it at all. Now that I’ve given myself the freedom to write whatever, I’ve been editing it and I’m ready to finally finish it a year after I originally planned to do so. Everything takes its time. And that’s fine.
Calling myself a writer motivates me to keep writing every day because if that’s what I am and I enjoy it, why wouldn’t I do it? Writing every day motivates me to keep calling myself a writer because if you write every day and you share your work with others or plan to do so, what else are you? Writing whatever I feel like writing drives me to keep doing it consistently and it brings the joy of the creative process back. It’s a circle fueled by my motivation that only generates more motivation and tangible outcomes. I feel like I’m 12 again, writing for the sake of writing, living my creative existence to its full potential and having a blast.
Giving myself multiple outlets and creative freedom transformed me into a writer. I no longer want to be one. I am one.
If you’re interested in reading more of my work:
