Shh…writing in secret

‘So what do you like to do in your spare time?’

It’s the BBQ question we often get after the ones about our job and our kids. You fidget a little and avoid eye contact before answering, ‘Oh, you know, I like to hike and read and bake French pastries.’

And write.

Why didn’t you say write?

The fear? The vulnerability? The fact that you feel like you shouldn’t call yourself a writer because you’re not making a living to write yet?

Yep, yep and yep.

For published authors, the fact that many unpublished authors write in secret is, well, no secret. Why? Because a lot of us did it (I’m waving my hand over here).

For a long time, the only person who knew I liked to write was my husband, and I probably would’ve hid it from him too if I was more crafty (I once heard of a woman who would lock herself in the bathroom to write what became her debut novel so that her husband never knew what she was doing). As for me, I preferred hubby knew that I was dabbling in storytelling rather than him think that I’d suddenly developed irritable bowel.

And while we wouldn’t hesitate to tell our family and friends that we’ve started learning Portuguese, taken up playing the bassoon or enrolled in line dancing classes, telling someone that you’ve started writing seems to open up a whole other level of vulnerability.

Why?

Well, there’s an element of expectation that, since most of us know how to pen a text message or a lengthy Reddit review, that we should also be able to write well. After all, we all did English at school, know how to spell (sort of) and can  speak just fine. Ergo, we should also be able to write. Non-writers often think that the only barrier to writing a publishable book is having the drive and motivation to do so. And while these are major players, being able to craft an engaging story with decent prose and page-worthy characters is also a must for anyone with one eye on the publishing industry.

And the truth is, that most of us aren’t natural born writers and need to learn, and hone, the craft (which a lot of non-writers just don’t get).

 So how do you overcome this fear of placing the ‘writer’ label on yourself? Well I don’t actually know (as I said, I was a write-in-secret kind of person too at the start). But maybe try to start by owning it. Don’t make a big deal of it to begin with, just casually throw it out there. Let your girlfriends know why you can’t make it to coffee this Saturday (there’s a short story deadline that you want to meet) or tell your in laws that they’ll have to bring desert over for Sunday dinner as you won’t have the time to make one because you’re too busy finishing off that online plotting course you enrolled in to worry about tiramisu.

And the next time you’re at a barbeque and someone asks what you do for fun, don’t forget to throw in writing after you’ve told them that you spend your weekends cultivating homemade kimchi and tending to your alpacas. And if they follow it up with that hairy, curve-ball question that we all dread in the beginning (‘So have you written anything I would’ve read?) just ask them to point you in the direction of the nearest retail outlet that stocks the hand-crafted winter woollies that they’ve told you they enjoy knitting.

Photo credit: Hussan Amir via Unsplash