*squees over secret joyness*
How to tell you're a real writer...*bold those that apply*
Do you welcome "writer's insomnia"-- that flood of creative ideas that keeps you wide-awake and excited for hours?
Do you have several cups, cans, or jars filled with pens, pencils and colored markers sitting on flat surfaces throughout your house or apartment? Do you put dry pens or markers back in the containers?
Are printer ink, paper and your "special" pen priorities on your shopping list? Have you ever returned home to discover you got the book you wanted on writing the perfect synopsis but you forgot the milk?
Have you ever been at a fine restaurant and noticed an interesting diner? As much as you try not to, you can't stop watching them because he or she serendipitously inspires the perfect secondary character for your novel or short story?
Do you critique movies as you watch them; deciding what character flaw would have been more interesting or plot line less predictable or ending more dramatic? Does this habit annoy your non-writing friends?
When you hear news stories about killer bees or flesh-eating bacteria or heinous crimes, are you more interested in the dramatic story potentials of such facts than the alarming elements of the story?
Are you able to embrace the goofy, eccentric people in your life because you have a genuine appreciation for the "characters" of the world?
Can you write regardless of the weather, a bad back, a head cold, hunger pangs, body odor, police sirens, ringing phones or impending surgery?
Do you ruminate on past arguments so you can capture the rhythm of the dialogue for a story you're writing? Are all disagreements "grist for the writing mill?"
Do the people you live with think you spend too much time traveling the creative, synopsis-filled world of your mind?
Your parents threaten to take you to a psychologist because you talk about the voices in your head. notices strange looks What? They're only my characters.
You carry a notebook and pen with you everywhere just in case.
You have an addiction to notebooks. Furthermore, your friends are under orders to keep you away from the notebook section of any store.
You give in and decide you don't care how weird you look and take out your laptop and start typing away happily while everyone around is dancing.
You manage to convert the whole party to writing and pass the laptop around so everyone can get a turn.
You have an addiction to pens/pencils and always gravitate to the ones in the display case.
Your bookshelf is lined with writing books.
The rest of your bookshelf is full of books that you wrote in grade school and beyond.
You think there's nothing weird about running down your laptop battery in an airport by writing for two straight hours about nothing in particular.
You're female, but your parents are more wary of lending your their credit card when you're heading to a bookstore than if you were going clothing shopping.
You're extremely picky about getting college-ruled paper, because "standard-ruled doesn't allow you to fit as much on one page."
You can't stand your English class because all of the stuff they want you to write about is, in your opinion, completely pointless, and if they'd just let you write about anything, you could easily come up with an awesome 20 page essay.
You find yourself talking out loud to yourself about how a character in your story would react to a certain situation.
You then proceed to act out said situation, dialogue and all...regardless of the fact that you live in a dorm, and the walls aren't thick enough to stop people living next to you from hearing you talking to yourself.
You have competitions with people you don't know as to who can write more in fifteen minutes.
You write 4 pages as opposed to two for a report and have to condense the font even if it's not allowed.
You know you're a writer when you read an article in Scientific American about the existence of parallel universes and you immediately start thinking about how a depressed college student would react to ending up in an alternate universe.
You know you're a writer when you can build an epic fantasy trilogy around a single bumper sticker.
When you started to listen to music constantly so your parents wouldn't overhear you talking to yourself. You still do this even though you live in a dorm. In fact, you have the music on specifically so people can't tell when you're talking to yourself.
When you can judge a book by its cover.
When you can tell what decade a book is from by the style of the cover.
When you are shocked when your mother says, "We don't need more bookcases; we just need to sell the books we have. We have too many. After all, there's no way you're going to read any of them again. I don't see you reading them now."
My response to that was, "Mom, the reason you don't see me reading them more often is because I remember the plots so well it's pointless."
When you remember the plot twists of a book you read once four years ago.
When you read published books and think that you could write it better.
When someone asks you a question and you reply with "that's the PERFECT catchphrase for insert character's name here !!"
You wake up in the middle of the night because you just dreamed up the best idea and drag yourself out of bed to write it down before you forget it tomorrow.
When you get the urge to write, you HAVE to write or you feel highly uncomfortable and get pissed off if you don't.
When you procrastinate like hell in your spare time, but when it comes time to go to a family dinner or something, you take precious pieces of paper, notepad, and pen just so you can plot in your head and jot down ideas while you're eating.
You randomly find a short story you wrote several years earlier while cleaning out your closet, and revise it so that it is much better, and you feel as though you have found and restored a lost priceless piece of art.
You know your characters better than your family/significant other
Because you have no more space on a bookshelf, you have piles of books assorted throughout the house, on your bedroom floor, in your closet, under the bed, on your bureau, and inside some of the drawers.
You are severely angry with yourself when you neglect writing down plot ideas and forget them the next day, and spend hours retracing your thoughts until you figure out what that plot was... and then you change it almost completely so it is 10 times better than it originally was.
You spend your time on this website when you should really be doing that English essay that's due tomorrow, on a topic that you feel wastes your writing efforts. cough . cough .
You can easily write a ton of these jokes... because they are true for you.
When you realize that these aren't jokes, but life truisms.
When you wish that you didn't use your Alphasmart in class because you can't draw that cool little device that might or might not be an important symbol to the characters in your book.
You scribble stories on every scrap of paper in any of your school notebooks, much to the amusement of your teachers.
Any web page you look at gives you fifteen billion ideas.
If you had the time, not even the bible (or any other holy book really, regardless of your own religion) would be safe from your personal twist on it.
You know you're a writer when, while surfing the web, you have this nearly uncontrollable urge to go around correcting the bad spelling and grammar in every post you read. 'Then' and 'than' being the biggest culprits, causing you to see red. ('Would of' and 'should of' coming next.)
You've overcome your notebook addiction because now you own a laptop you bought specifically for writing.
You get disgrunteld when people you know who failed at previous writing contests fail to try again.
When you're the only one in the office and instead of work you're typing plot ideas to mail to your home computer
You threaten bloody murder if you catch another family member using your 'special' pen. (_ so many times...)
The pleasure of reading a really great book is marred just a little by the fact that you didn't write it.
You realize that everything you've ever written is garbage and you vow never to write another word, but you still get up the next morning and carry on writing as if nothing had happened.
You spend your lunch and breaks jotting down story outlines and wonder why one contains a lot of sex.
Your house is only clean when you have writer's block.
You have plot outlines/notes/bits of poetry mixed in with things like chemistry forumlas, because you didn't even want to waste time switching notebooks in class to write down ideas
You constantly find yourself mentioning writing as a normal activity among people who have no clue what you're on about
You feel the urge to read every post that you write once it's published just to check for errors.
If you find any errors, you can't rest until you have edited and fixed any mistakes.
You've started talking to the characters in your head during class and severly frightened the teacher. *points at Neville* IT WAS HIS FAULT! ...And mine...I guess >.>
Your English teacher gives you a short story writing assignment and you actually squeal like a little girl (with no offense to persons little or girl implied).
Everyone in your family is firmly convinced that you're going to make it as a writer, though you can't remember any of them ever reading your work. That confidence has to come from somwhere, right?
When writing about incesteous twins and their sucidial triplet seems like a good idea
When the little things spark intense writing
When lyrics inspire you to write something (anything), as long as it conveys the hidden message between said lyrics
When you have the urge to start writing down things you say to use them for future reference in a novel
If you aren't happy unless you're reading at least three books and writing five.
When you have a five magic pens
When you have a hundred stories stored on your hardrive, none of them finished