You might think I'm bold to write an essay offering up advice on becoming a writer when my one an only novel has yet to hit the shelves. But I figure I've only got a tiny window before that book of mine is out there in the wide world, and someone makes a disparaging comment, and I start to wonder if I really am a writer after all.
So...
First and foremost, if you want to be a writer, don't learn to spell. Otherwise you'll never have upwards of 20 per cent deducted for spelling mistakes on every high school English exam you ever write. You'll never decide you prefer calculus to the written word, and it's just the conclusion you must come to in order to set yourself on the writing path.
Next, head off to a well-regarded university, your first-year courses selected using only the criteria that you don't have to write (i.e. spell) a thing. Hang on to your penchant for calculus, but notice that you don't quite fit in, with that volume of Tolstoy you drag around, those poets and Newfoundlanders you inevitably end up with at the bar. Ask around. Find out that, at the end of first year, you've got the prerequisites for a B.Sc. in almost anything, that you can get a degree in chemistry, biology too, without having to write a single word.
Cathy Marie Buchanan's debut novel, The Day the Falls Stood Still, launches in September in Canada and the U.S. and in early November in the U.K. and Italy.
Talk to your parents, two of the most practical people you've ever met. Let them instill in you an expectation that there should be a little bacon frying up in the pan after four years of hard work. It'll help you notice that biotechnology seems to be the thing, that the pharmaceutical industry is hot. Sail though four years of biochemistry, thinking how cool it is that you understand exactly how the ham sandwich you swallow becomes the carbon dioxide you exhale and the adenosine triphosphate that lets your muscles contract. But spend some time in the lab, enough to let you see that cooking up enzymatic reactions isn't quite as much fun as getting lost in a book.
Write the GMAT. Heck, by now you've mastered multiple choice. And you can use a calculator the way the liberal arts or even economics grads only wish they could. Do an MBA. Why not? Everyone else is and the alternative is the lab. Get your highest mark writing a speech championing free trade, an exam you approach with fear and trepidation, the only numberless one you'll write in years. Dismiss the mark as a fluke, nothing to do with persuasiveness of your writing, even though you secretly fear that globalization tastes like Wonder Bread.
Give in. Take a creative writing course...
Get a job at IBM. Surrounded by engineers and math types in a world where the customers expect the proposals to make sense, it will hit you like a ton of bricks: You can write pretty well, at least better than the engineers. You'll become the person who gathers the half-sentences, who innately knows every clause has a subject and a verb, who can transform scribbles on a whiteboard into paragraphs the customer understands. But with your tendency to spend your weekends reading, rather than building stuff from bits of metal and plastic bought at The Source, you still don't quite fit in.
