Call me what you will...

I like to call myself a writer and maybe I’m unsure why. Maybe it’s because people tell me I have a knack for wording things in a specific way that caters to a specific audience in a specific manner of my choosing. Maybe it’s because I once wrote a short story that caught the eye of some friends and family and that automatically constitutes my brand image a writer. Maybe it’s because I love to write, even if I’m picky about what I write about and when I write it.

I can’t call myself a writer. I am a writing major with specific successes and even more epic failures that deem the response “what the fuck?” An audience has to call me a writer based on their experiences with writing and what they feel constitutes “writing,” in any of its forms.

I don’t read, I don’t note small things that should be written down for later use in writing, I don’t envision anything that I may want to write about, I give poor critiques to others if I’m uninterested and I claim to know more than I do about certain things. I don’t properly proof read anything I write until it is positively reinforced as a “good piece of writing.” I lack the confidence to recognize when a piece of my writing is a valid and well constructed piece of literature and I overestimate other pieces of writing simply because I use good diction and large words. I lack the ability to recognize when I’ve bludgeoned a dead horse, lost the reader or poorly constructed a scene (although I’m working on that.)

I enjoy being lazy. I enjoy telling myself “I’ll do it this afternoon.” I enjoy getting drunk and accomplishing abso-fucking-lutely nothing and feeling bad that it hasn’t positively impacted my literature the next day.

I write this with full knowledge that very few pieces of my writing will get published and the one’s that do may end up on a coffee table, better suited as a coaster for some middle-aged widow’s three day old cup of coffee that she's never coming back to, except to dispose of when her girlfriends visit next and they share several glasses of wine and several stories of epic disappointment.

These are my flaws. Unlabored flawlessness does not exist and recognizing that it is unachievable is the first step any one person can make in achieving effortless success in anything they do.