Yes, getting published makes you feel like a legit writer, but there are other ways to know if you live, breathe and eat words.
The 10 signs below are just a partial list. I’m sure you have your own brand of craziness that makes you a writer.
These just happen to be my faves.
1. You’ve stopped following friends and family on Facebook whose posts are riddled with grammatical errors. Admit it. You grimace when Aunt Betty uses the wrong there, their or they’re. Her s’mores pie is still bomb, but her daily devotional messages with no regard for subject-verb agreement? Not so much. You offered to edit her posts because that’s what Jesus would do, right? But she refused because her “1,524 FB friends” are reading her messages for the word, not good grammar.
2. You don’t take rejection personally. You simply see a “no” to your groundbreaking piece on “The Art of Caring for Others” as Time magazine’s loss. Or when your agent said five houses turned down the opportunity to publish your YA novel about wolves, you believe it’s because “they didn’t get it.” Rejection is just an ugly part of the process—and it hurts—but it doesn’t stop your hustle.
3. You spot typos and spelling errors in random places and it makes you sick. It annoys you that the local diner’s menu reads Cesar salad, instead of Caesar salad. (Seriously, did everyone fail history?) Oh, and that chocolate crunch cake is a dessert, not a desert.
4. You see every person as a character in a future story. The auntie who encourages her seven kids to play Hide ‘N’ Seek in Home Depot; the commitment-phobic ex who prefers open relationships; and the cousin with the fruit allergy but chose citrus as her college major are all begging to be explored in a memoir entitled: The Effed People In My Life & Why I Love Them.
5. You can’t bust a grape in a food fight, but a war of words is your Game Of Thrones. Anyone can bite a line jumper’s ankle at Cedar Point amusement park, but to tell this offender that he has a microphallus (a small penis) or declare him a ninnyhammer (a fool), well, those people breathe rare air and that is your specialty.
6. You are impressed by a stranger’s Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score (formerly known as the verbal portion) on the SAT, and could are less about the math. Who cares if she’s a trigonometry whiz, big freakin’ deal. You’re intrigued by how she answered the writing prompt based on Dana Gioia’s “Why Literature Matters” New York Times essay.
7. You are a triple-word score whore at Scrabble. Word games bring out your American Ninja. You use letters J (8 points), Q (10 points) and Z (10 points) with ease to make opponents feel small, while collecting triple-letter points. Who else knows how to spell qanat, but an awesome superhero writing geek?
8. You re-write bad TV movies—while watching them. No one enjoys viewing “I Kidnapped a Baby From the Hospital For You, David” with you because you interrupt the show with: “Does the writer know anything about dialogue?” “What kind of plot twist is that?” “So we’re just going to ignore how predictable this is?”
Then you follow that up with: “If I wrote this I would’ve….”
9. Your Yelp reviews are lit, as in literature. Seriously, Zadie Smith would be jealous. Bad service? Good food? Dried egg on your cutlery? An appetizer in the shape of an azalea? That new trendy restaurant is going to receive a glowing four-star review or the one-star body slam, complete with perfection diction and haunting metaphors.
10.Your friends make you edit, okay write, their important emails. Your bestie loves your mean girl Yelp reviews, and she knows that ripping her landlord a new one about her about frequent bathroom floods with your bougie/boujee/bourgie/bourgeois vocab gives you eternal life.
