You are a writer and so am I

Sitting next to me on my left is the freshly printed outline for my novel, the whole 20 or so pages of it, on my right there are two cups, one filled with water, another with tea, and my IPod touch. Of course there are other things on my desk, pointless clutter, a lava lamp, bits of stationary and a lot of paper but the few items I names earlier are the ones that stand out the most to me.

I don’t like to call myself a writer, in real life that is, I flaunt the title when I am on the internet from the comfort of my home but once I leave and enter the real world I push that aside. Of course like a lot of writers I show the often obvious signs of being one.

An old saying goes ‘You can tell a lot about a woman by the contents of her purse.’ But for the sake of this post I'm going to say, ‘You can tell a lot about a person by the contents of their bag.’ I've often wondered whether or not this is true, could someone look into my bag and call me a writer? Well, I reckon they could.

What does my bag contain?

• My wallet in the shape of a postcard, contains lots of receipts from cafés 
• A laptop with a large charger and extension cord
• My IPod and two sets of headphones
•  Cell phone with USB charger
•  Refill pad – lined pieces of paper usually half filled with notes and tea-stained
• Normal white pieces of paper - unlined
•  Pieces of loose paper square paper excellent for origami and sticky notes in a variety of shapes and colours
• A notebook – A5
• A pencil case with a wide range of pens, pencils and highlighters as well as paper-clips
• Fingerless gloves
• Hand sanitizer
• Old napkins from places like McDonalds or cafés
• A couple of USBs
• Some lose pens floating around for the times when I can’t get around to finding and then opening my pencil case
• And at the very bottom there are a few coins, receipts, an old mint box and pencil shavings.

I'm not sure who else would carry everything in the list above with them.  Most of my friends carry around some makeup, a cellphone and a wallet in their small thin-strapped bags or they just shove whatever they have into their pockets.

I tend to go for a thick-strapped shoulder bag, sized for my monster of a laptop, or a backpack alike to the one I use for school even when I am merely hanging out with friends. Of course before I meet up with them I spend an hour or two in a café just writing or using up the free Wi-Fi.

To me the contents of my bag does describe me, I am neat but messy and I am one of those ‘just-in-case-bla-bla-bla-happens-I-need-this’ type of person with my numerous notepads, paper and notebooks – I like to be prepared. And of course, I am a writer.

Getting back to where the starting point of this blog, having those things beside me, the outline already ink splattered from the printer, the tea on one side for caffeine, it makes me feel like a writer, a real one. Perhaps the reason I am so afraid of calling myself one is because I don’t feel like one. I feel more like a wannabe than a real writer but there are no wannabes in writing are there? There’s people that write and there’s people that don’t and I'm proud to be a writer.

From now on I will tell people, friends and family, perhaps even strangers, that I am a writer and if you’re like me, a teen writer that dreams of becoming a writer, if you write you already are one. What I think you want to become is a published, you want to become an author.

If you write stories in the dark spending hours on them, have experienced the frustration of writers block, know what it’s like to talk to characters in your head, find yourself hunting for a pen and furiously scribbling an idea down in the oddest of situations – on the toilet, or even if it’s just one of those, you’re a writer so call yourself one! You are a writer and so am I.

Make it your goal to acknowledge this if you haven’t already and just remember, anyone can be a writer, but 

not everybody can be an author. It’s the writers that push through the dramas of writing that become authors, and that can be you, if you don’t give up. So don’t give up, keep writing, you are after all, a writer aren't you?

Janna