You Know You’re A Writer When…

Hey everyone! Welcome back to DOTL. Ready for some fun memes and you-know-you’re-a-writer-when’s!

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You want to experience fainting or have someone knock you unconscious – just so you know how it feels and can write from experience.

You’re willing to do crazy things to better understand what your characters go through. Go into a crowd of people and start a riot? No problem! Attempt sky-diving even though you have a horrible fear of heights? Why not! Eat a whole piece of rotting pumpkin pie? Fine. Take out the trash and clean your room? Eh…I’ll get back to you on that one.

You have conversations with your characters in your head. When you’re supposed to be focusing on school or important lectures, your mind has a habit of wandering to your characters and finding new ways to make their lives miserable.

You take great delight in killing people. Especially the evil ones.

People often find you staring off into space. When they ask you why you’re zoned off, you have to come back from the battle scene that you were fully engaged in. It takes you a full ten minutes to make the transition. Man, this world we live in is so simple in comparison!

Sometimes you’re talking to someone and they say something really perfect and you think, “THIS IS GOING INTO MY NOVEL.”

You want to be chased by a band of armed men and women (and maybe a fire breathing dragon, a hideous monster or a giant snake) so that you can find realistic ways to escape and get out alive. What wonderful hands-on research!

It’s four AM and you’re half asleep…then a marvelous idea pops into your head. You jump out of bed, fumble for your lamp and grab a pen and paper. Even though you’re half blind from the sudden burst of light, you scribble furiously. This idea has to be written down. Thirty minutes later you lay back in bed, hope your writing is legible in the morning and then are so excited that you can’t fall to sleep until it’s time to get up and start the day.

You like drinks. A lot. Coffee, tea, kombucha, lemonade…your best friends.

You hear a particularly heartbreaking, instrumental song and think, “That would be the perfect soundtrack to that death scene in my novel.”

You dream of your novel being turned into a movie someday. You already know which actors will play which characters.

You wait for the after-back-to-school sale on notebooks and then buy twenty. They’ll all be filled up come next year!

Your wrists and back ache agonizingly. You can’t figure out why…then your friend reminds you that you spent the entire day hunched over your computer and typing furiously.

You see people on the street, in church, at the store and you think, “They’d be perfect to include in my story. They just have the LOOK of a villain!”

Your forehead is bruised from all of the times you’ve banged it on your computer keys because you can’t get that scene right or the plot has a major hole.

Your trashcan is filled with crumpled papers, red ink and dashed dreams.

People say you’re a procrastinator. You choose to think that you’re “choosing to focus on the truly important things in life”…which at this moment is watching that fly buzz around your room.

When you’re in the middle of a scary experience, a passing though flits through your mind. This will make a great story one day. Maybe I can add it to that story I’m writing….

You have great punctuation and spelling…even in texts. You cringe at the sloppy, barely-legible texts that the mere mortals send back and forth.

You’re an introvert… spending time with your characters is less socially awkward.

You love eavesdropping on people, or as you call it, real life dialog research.

Your school books have random story ideas scrawled in the margins. In the spaces where your math answers should be, you’ve drawn pictures of your characters instead.

And finally….you think about writing more than you think about eating, sleeping or taking showers. People complain sometimes and you wonder why, until you look in the mirror and realize that your hair resembles oil-coated noodles.

Words are your life.

While not all of these (maybe none of them) might apply to YOU, there is one thing that all writers can agree on. That’s our love for the written word. Words have immense power to impact those around us – for better or for worse. Maybe you’re the shy, introverted teen (uh, like me) or maybe you’re super out going and make friends with everyone around you. Maybe you hate coffee or can’t stand procrastinating. Everyone is different and unique and those aspects of our personalities will affect our writing. So whoever you are – misfit, stranger, daughter, son, grandparent, farmer – pick up your pen and let’s get to work!

~Hattush