— Becoming a Writer

When I was young I read somewhere - don’t remember who said it any more - that if you want to be a writer, you should write. You should sit down and write for ten years and at the end of that time you’ll be a writer.

So that’s what I did. That was my way. I thought it was good advice. I still believe it to be good advice. But these days, if I say that to someone, I have to qualify it by stressing that one should also read. Read, read, read.

There are variations along the path to becoming a writer. One thing always leads to another.

After a time of ’sitting down and writing’, the budding writer, with a degree of luck, enters a phase of consciousness where it becomes a possibility for him or her to choose another writer, dead or alive, and to work with that other writer as a master.

It’s like being an acolyte. You sit at the feet of the other and absorb what it is they have to give. And all the effort you put in during that time is stored away in your writers’ being as reserves of eloquence.

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