Robert Rankin — the wonderfully strange author of The Antipope and The Brentford Triangle — once gave me a piece of advice that sounded like a joke but turned out to be one of the most useful things anyone's ever told me about writing.
"Wear a silly shirt," he said, "and tell everyone you're a writer."
I met Robert on a writing course years ago, and I've thought about this advice constantly ever since. On the surface, it sounds flippant. But there's something profound buried in it.
Most people who want to write spend years in a kind of limbo. They write in secret. They don't tell anyone what they're working on. They call it a "hobby" or something they do "on the side." They wait for permission — an agent's acceptance, a publisher's contract, some external validation that will finally allow them to use the word "writer" without feeling like a fraud.
This is backwards.
You don't become a writer when someone else says you are. You become a writer when you decide you are.
The silly shirt is a commitment device. It's a way of saying: I'm doing this now. Not someday. Not when I'm published. Now. It forces you to own the identity before you feel ready — because you'll never feel ready, and waiting for readiness is just another form of not writing.
When you start to think of yourself as a writer, something shifts. You begin to notice the world differently. You observe conversations and wonder how you'd write them. You see a scene in a coffee shop and mentally compose the description. You're not being pretentious — you're being professional, the way a carpenter looks at furniture and notices the joinery.
The identity precedes the output. Not the other way around.
This doesn't mean you have to be arrogant or delusional. You don't have to pretend you've achieved things you haven't. But you can claim the practice. You can say "I'm a writer" and mean "I'm someone who writes, regularly, seriously, with intent to improve." That's all it takes.
So I'm passing it on. Wear the silly shirt. Tell people you're a writer. Then go home and write.