You May Just Be A Writer When...

I've been meaning to make a list like this for a while, but things just kept getting in the way. Now that my muse has come back and I don't have any writing to post at the moment, I figured now would be a good time to make the list.

1) You silently narrate your whole life, pretending that it could be interesting enough for a novel.
     I know it sounds like I'm crazy, but for someone who leads a very boring life, it makes each day a little more fun. Most people would call it daydreaming, and a majority of the time it leads to daydreaming, but what I am talking about here is less dreaming and more thinking... If that makes sense. Instead of imagining images, I imagine words.

2) You are ridiculously attached to your first notebook, despite the fact that your first attempts at writing are pretty bad.
     My first note book is a skinny black thing. My grandma gave it to me, even though she didn't know about my dreams of becoming a writer. Actually, at that point I had barely realized the dream either. After writing in the book for a while, I found that I really enjoyed it, and was already tweaking what I had written.

3) You write a blog.
     I know that a lot of people who have no intention of becoming a writer also write blogs, but I've also noticed that the few blogs I read are sporadic and updated only once a week, if even that. I feel that a true writer is dedicated to their blog and will update it often and dutifully. they will also talk almost exclusively about writing, which I realize is probably wearing on you guys.

4) You love to read.
     It's a common known fact that all writers are also readers. I admit, I'm a slow reader, but it's because I hate rushing through a book. I often find myself skipping a paragraph ahead because I'm excited to see what happens, but as soon as I do that, I feel like I've missed something important, and have to re-read the whole page. In other words, I hate to miss even a single word. Despite this though, or maybe because of it, I have a bookcase full of books (Around 150, last time I counted) They are organized in alphabetical order by last name, and are actually starting to spill onto my second book case.

5) You are excited to wait in line for four hours just to see your favourite author for four minutes.
     Best day of my life. I met one of my favourite authors, Brandon Sanderson. I stood in line for about three, maybe four hours... Or maybe it just seemed like that long, honestly I wasn't paying attention to the time. Either way, I got a picture with him, which still makes me smile. I was even an hour late for my friend's birthday party, but she completely understood, as she is as devoted to photography as I am to reading and writing.

6) You keep a stash of sharpened pencils next to your bed.
     I can't even count the amount of times I've turned my light back on so that I could write something down while in bed. Since I'm always kept awake at night thinking, it's the best time to come up with new ideas. Every once in a while I'll even come up with a poem. One night I was getting annoyed by some light that was coming through my blinds. They fell on my bedroom door and my closet door, so I wrote a poem about them, along with the moon and the shadow that forms between my bookcase and the wall. The whole poem was through my perspective when I'm not wearing my glasses. I handed it in as one of my poems for my poetry class last year, and my teacher said it was amazing and must have taken me forever to write... Not to brag or anything...

7) You actively try and recruit people to read the books you like.
     As I am doing with the list of books at the bottom of the page... But yeah, I've gotten two of my friends reading Wheel of Time... Or at least one who is a fan, and one who has bought the first book. Unfortunately, most of my friends are either not very into reading, or they read the teen fiction stuff that I hate.

8) You understand and hate Gary and Mary Sues.
     The term Gary Sue and Mary Sue refers to a perfect character. A lot of people call the characters in Twilight Gary and Mary Sues, because it's obvious that the two male characters were made for girls to fall in love with, and the female character was made for girls to wish to be her. Gary and Mary Sues normally try to please everyone, they're stunning to the point of being inhuman (even if they are human) or they have flaws that are far too cliché or ironic for the book (Ex. Bella's clumsiness)

9) Every once in a while you get a good idea for an essay...
     Then you realize that you're being crazy and write a story instead. This happened mostly when I was in high school, and barely had to write essays. Now that I'm in college, I've written more essays in one semester than I care to write in a year. And I still have three more to go, not including finals or other smaller projects and assignments.

10) Chat speak annoys the hell out of you.
     I cannot even force myself to write it. I look back at my sentence, and start to edit it using chat speak grammar. I start thinking 'what is the substitute for l? Is it 1? Looks close enough. But wait, that doesn't make the word shorter, that's the point of chatspeak, right? Okay, how do I make the word shorter? Take out a vowel? No, then you can't understand... Hell, I don't understand it anyway, I give up.' Yeah, trying to write in chatspeak takes me much longer than just writing every work out properly, even it is means going back to correct spelling errors.


Hope you enjoyed my lovely list. I'll add more if I think of more later on.