How Can I Step More Fully Into My Writer’s Identity?

Welcome to “Ask the Coach.” As a writing coach, I answer questions from writers about making the work of writing happen, tackling craft, business, and personal questions along the way. (Have a question you’d like answered? Check the details at the end of the article about how to submit one.)

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Today I’m responding to a reader about more fully inhabiting one’s identity as a writer:

“How can I cultivate and step into my writer’s identity more fully, or better design and live a ‘curated’ writing lifestyle? I want to engage in the routines and rituals of my writing lifestyle with aplomb, no matter the storyline or plot twists of daily life, and let them serve to enhance my writer’s identity.”

Amen to this. I’m on my own quest in this regard too. Let’s look at this from a few different angles to see what insights we can glean.

1. The desire to live a writer’s life is real.

Something many writers have in common is a desire for a writer’s life, which most likely includes:

Putting words on the page, regularly and consistently.
Having time and space to think, ponder, and reflect.
Managing or “curating” our experiences and inputs (what we feed our minds).
Sharing our work with an audience.

And when we aren’t being a writer in the way we know we want to be, there’s an inner sense of wanting more. Our intuitive, inner wisdom tells us if we are out of alignment with writing with that pull to more fully live a writer’s life.

2. Writing is also a job, not only an identity or lifestyle.

At the same time, we can romanticize a writer’s life or lifestyle and create distance between “now” and “then” that leaves us filled with longing and separation, which can sometimes become self-perpetuating. (Enneagram Four types know what I’m talking about here, I suspect.)

In other words, we can get stuck in longing without taking action.

What helps here is to also treat writing as a profession, as well as an identity and lifestyle.

While that might minimize the romantic aspects we find appealing, it also helps us make peace with any not-so-nice writing days that come about. (I’ve always appreciated Steven Pressfield’s take that writing is more like a blue-collar job than not.)

Reminding yourself that writing is also a job helps you internalize how much it’s about showing up and doing the work of writing, regardless of how you’re feeling and how well the words are flowing, or not.

3. Do claim your identity as a writer.

While there are some who will deign to make requirements about who’s allowed to call themselves a writer or not, if you’re writing, you’re a writer. Call yourself a writer, identify yourself as a writer when you introduce yourself, include it in your profiles, and more. And don’t use any qualifiers like “aspiring” before writer.

Name and claim your identity and role as a writer to strengthen your sense of self, purpose, and identity. It will also motivate you to do the work to make your claim real.

4. Writing is about taking action.

To put a finer point on it, from what I’ve seen working with writers and being a writer myself, the more we take action to write and to market our writing, the more fully we “feel like a writer.” Doing the work is where the rubber meets the road.

Not doing the work is where we start to fall apart and lose our sense of self.

So the most significant way to more fully inhabit our writing lifestyle is to write regularly and consistently.

5. Close your writer’s life gap in specific ways.

And, having said that, living a writer’s life isn’t only about taking action to write.

The rest is real. We need time and space to process, daydream, and reflect. We are affected by the environments we inhabit, the beliefs we hold, the messages we tell ourselves, and more.

Earlier this year, I led an online workshop about “stepping into your writer’s identity” where we walked through multiple life areas to examine where we are now and what we want, in order to begin to close the gap between the two.

We checked in with our surroundings, supports, actions, strengths, beliefs, values, identity, and vision to see where we wanted to make adjustments. I teach a similar process in my Make This Your Year to Write course: to first examine the gap between the life you’re living and the life you want to be living, and to then clearly define specific actions to close the gap.

I suggest walking yourself through a similar process to identify the shifts you want to make and move yourself closer to where you want to be. Take care to identify actionable steps, not vague changes. For example: “I want to write more” vs. “I will write daily for 2 hours.”

6. Build routines and structures.

You also mentioned routines and rituals and how you want to engage with them “with aplomb, no matter the storyline or plot twists of daily life.” Yes!

The beauty of a sturdy writing routine is that it is will help you stay more steady through life’s challenges. It’s not perfect; emergencies happen, and life happens. But the more solidly you build your writing practice, the easier it is to keep writing or return to it as quickly as possible.

These routines, habits, and structures are what make living a writer’s life real. It’s perfectly OK to build up to these practices gradually. I like to start with a target and make moderate adjustments until I get to where I want to be. It’s also perfectly OK — arguably important — to find a structure that works with your life and natural flow.

7. Trust you’ll get through the plot twists.

As you’ve noted, life will throw plot twists and challenges our way. I admire your intention to let them serve as inspiration, and to enhance your identity as a writer.

What comes to mind is “observe, don’t absorb” — in other words, to foster a sense of being an observer and recorder of the world around you. Having said that, many writers are highly empathetic, intuitive, and sensitive — part of what makes us great at writing about the human condition — so it may be a place to arrive rather than to strive to inhabit.

Here’s what I mean: when you’re in the wringer of life, you may not have perspective and distance in that moment. That’s OK. In fact, that’s possibly a good thing, since your characters will be “in it” too. So give yourself grace as you navigate the hard moments, and then gift yourself the opportunity to reflect on them as they pass.

And then go back to writing.

That’s a Wrap

What does it mean to live a writer’s life? While it could be a romantic idea that keeps you from taking action to write, sometimes it’s an inner knowing you aren’t quite giving yourself what you need as a writer to feel fulfilled, happy, and satisfied. This is a great opportunity to examine more closely where you are, where you want to be, and start designing a plan to move you closer to that point.