Realising that you are a great writer, that you are truly naturally talented, is one of the best feelings in the whole world. You’re writing a seemingly normal sentence when it strikes you hard. Deep in the chest, somewhere. You realise that you love what you just wrote. I mean, you’re obsessed with it. It could be a line, a paragraph, an entire story or even just a particularly well-chosen word.
You kind of blush and the hairs on your skin stand up on their ends. It’s not like you’re going to share this small victory with anyone. You’re not calling mom up to tell her about that time you connected a plot point to three separate themes in your novel. Instead, as adrenaline flows through your body, you are silent.
That’s because you know what comes next: the realisation that you don’t have to work as hard as others. You don’t have to practice your craft because you’ve got this one down. It’s easy, right? Thinking this way, you start to write less often. When you do, it’s nothing revolutionary. You tell yourself you’ll do better, go farther with your work later. Some unspecified time in the future. Who knows when it could be? But you’re so sure of yourself that you just know you’ll be able to pull it out of your ass when the time comes.
Let me tell you that that’s not true. When that day comes, you will be out of practice—downright rusty. All the time those other writers spent on improving themselves is gone and you wasted it. They will surpass you in ability and success. This is dangerous for anyone who has a natural talent for anything, but I am a writer and this is my problem.
Sometimes I don’t even dare to call myself a writer because I put it on the backburner so much. School, work, other obligations and clubs, a social life; they all have come between me and writing for a long time. While I still have to fulfill those obligations, I think my resolution—not just for 2014 but for life—is to make more time, more room, for writing in my life.
