The Vagabond Trust
Writers At Home In Migration

This is part one of an ongoing series of articles to help you start writing. This series should appear every Thursday.

I can’t offer you a lot of advice on how to make a career as a writer, except for this: you’ll never make it if you don’t write, and you also have to finish what you write. This is also true if you want to write casually.

If you’re not already writing, this can be a pretty intimidating idea.

Fortunately, it’s also a pretty simple idea. If you want to write, you need to write. It’s so basic that you wouldn’t think there is a need to say it, but many would-be writers need to be reminded of this. It’s very easy to get caught up in daydreaming about being a wildly successful, rich and famous author, or to talk yourself into believing that you don’t have time to write, or that you don’t have anything to write about. Or maybe you think that you don’t have the tools, the talent, or the training necessary to be a writer.

You’re wrong.

Writing is a skill that can be learned. You can get better with practice. Writing doesn’t require any special tools. It’s true that you’re extremely unlikely to become wildly successful, rich and famous. You may never be as skilled as your favourite authors, and you might never even get paid for your work at all. But none of this means that you can’t write.

Here’s what you need to get started:

1. Access to a computer with a text editor or a word processor.
2. An idea.

That’s it. Seriously.

1. Access to a computer with a text editor or a word processor.

I recommend a text editor (something like Notepad for Windows, TextEdit for Mac, or gEdit for Linux) instead of a word processor (something like Microsoft Word, Pages, or OpenOffice Writer). You can use whatever text editor comes with your computer. There are others available if you don’t like what you’ve got, but I really wouldn’t put too much thought into choosing a text editor.

The idea behind using a text editor instead of a word processor is that text editors are less distracting. I find that when I write in a word processor I am more likely to play with different fonts and formatting options, check my word count, and do a lot of things that aren’t writing. I can get distracted in a text editor as well, but it happens a lot less often.

That said, if you find that you prefer to write in a word processor, there’s nothing wrong with doing so. The point here is to get you to write, not to get you to write the same way I do.

You’ll notice that I’m not recommending that you write with a pen and paper. Or on a type writer. Or that you carve your words into a clay tablet. This is because I’m trying to make writing an easier task for you. Anything that you don’t create on a computer adds an extra step to the process, because you’ll need to type it into your text editor or word processor when you’re done writing it, unless you don’t ever plan to show your writing to anyone and don’t want your work to be easily preserved.

Tip: Save your work often while you’re writing. There’s nothing more frustrating than working on a story and losing all of your work because you didn’t save it and your computer crashed, or the power went out, etc.

2. An idea.
When I say that you need an idea, I don’t want to give you the impression that you need to know everything that is going to happen in your story before you sit down to write. You don’t. What you need to get started is just some facet of your story that you can work with. Maybe you have an idea for a character, or a setting that you want to work with. Maybe there’s a scene in your head that you don’t have a context for yet.

Maybe you don’t actually have an idea, or you can’t decide what you want to write about. There’s nothing wrong with trying to find some inspiration. As Jordan Trethewey suggested here a few weeks ago, you can always try a writing prompt from Writer’s Digest if you need a little help.

It doesn’t actually matter what your idea is, yet. Open your text editor or word processor, and write it down. You may not keep what you’ve just written, but it’s a good idea to write it down anyway, so that you don’t lose your thoughts. Write down anything you can at this point - descriptions of characters or settings, snippets of dialogue, events that you think will take place, absolutely anything. And don’t forget to save the file; you’ll need it later.

That’s all for this week. Next week we’ll get into actually working with the ideas that you’ve written down. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free post a comment on this site, or email me at mromard@gmail.com.