Well when I wrote my first book in the first grade I was brilliant. It's been a slow creative decline ever since. ;P
In all seriousness, I think I had two things naturally going for me--being obsessive and having a strong sense of taste. But there was very little natural writing talent involved.
It took me: filling up notebooks, writing tens of thousands of words on a dozen forum rpgs with friends, getting a degree in professional writing, editing for a job, reading almost three decades' worth of books, and starting and failing many projects...just to reach the painful squirrelly years of "not being completely sucky, but still fumbling along untested and unpublished."
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even bother responding to this thread until there are Goodreads reviews of my books saying I'm the next literary Messiah. What if I'm actually a deeply sucky writer who will never be good at this? What if lots of hard work doesn't pay off for everyone? What if some people should never write and never be published, and I'm one of them?! Ahhh!
In all seriousness, I think I had two things naturally going for me--being obsessive and having a strong sense of taste. But there was very little natural writing talent involved.
It took me: filling up notebooks, writing tens of thousands of words on a dozen forum rpgs with friends, getting a degree in professional writing, editing for a job, reading almost three decades' worth of books, and starting and failing many projects...just to reach the painful squirrelly years of "not being completely sucky, but still fumbling along untested and unpublished."
Honestly I feel like I shouldn't even bother responding to this thread until there are Goodreads reviews of my books saying I'm the next literary Messiah. What if I'm actually a deeply sucky writer who will never be good at this? What if lots of hard work doesn't pay off for everyone? What if some people should never write and never be published, and I'm one of them?! Ahhh!