What you have to do to be a writer

Books are deceptive.
They appear to be written like they are read, fluently and without pause. So writing is partly about learning to perfect a craft by reading something that already appears perfected. It gives a false impression that something that is easy to understand can be easy to duplicate.
Consider the book as a building with words as its bricks: though straight walls are not so difficult to erect, arches and corners are much harder. If one part of the structure is unstable then the whole building collapses, for it is the architecture as a whole that attracts attention and decides success. The secret of the constructor is to show no joins.
Writing and reading is language in silence that forms a link between two people without utterance. It is contact from one who is giving to another who, by receiving the words, acknowledges. Story writing is using words that first have to describe before they can impress and become more than the sum of their parts. Then the story is something almost separate from the words that transmit it. It is already there, waiting to be understood. Work in progress becomes a process of eliminating mistakes until the words that are left are good enough to be rewritten.
There is rarely a book published that could not have been bettered, but it shows the skill of the writer that he is able to convey an impression of finality to some who could probably be fooled by a lot less effort. There will always be authors who know grammar extensively, are perfect at spelling and who can write syntax like a professor. But writing is a disposition, not the natural vocation of those academically qualified in the disciplined arrangement of words, and a technical writer would find it difficult to 'tell' a story from a character's point of view.
Learning to write isn't having different sized envelopes for different sized correspondence or ink pens in one box and pencils in another. It isn't avoiding smudges on paper, or staggering through words conscious of nouns, verbs, adjectives, participles, prepositions or clauses. It isn't meetings in libraries discussing one another's stories which might have a chance of winning local competitions, or reading the Times Literary Supplement to find the most topical themes. Neither is it studying Phrenological diagrams with the word 'Inspiration' circled. Writing is something that cannot be helped, like an illness. There isn't a writer of any merit who will not have to go through the marathon of incessant work. He can miss a day, a month or even a year without putting blue on white, but the work he imagines he's sidestepped only waits further up the path.
Every writer is his own legislator and law enforcer. He sets his own rules and sticks to guidelines. But all have to revise, correct and rewrite. The bad stuff has to be written out of the system first so that the better stuff can come through, even though that bad stuff, which seemed wonderful at the time, came from the best effort. It is impossible to intentionally write something below standard simply to save time and get to the better stuff easier because most words put down on paper have to be built or elaborated upon.
Integrity is important. Six or seven pages may be done that need about sixty to seventy per cent rewriting, but this is only removing the layers of dust and dirt that covers the core. It is like an archaeological excavation where a gold pot is unearthed, and it is brushed and cleaned until presentable. It is a matter of digging, and writers keep digging until they arrive at a vein where the hand can't move fast enough to keep pace with the thoughts. Some images are lost but most of them are caught.
Poets might get inspiration from falling in love or some other emotion, but the inspiration in writing prose comes from the act of creating from the mind. Writing is its own inspiration. No one sees the mind of a writer moving like they can the hands of a computer programmer. Most people will accept the union of brain and body working together if there is physical motion justifying even the most inert pose. But they will resent having to understand thought as work without a button to press or a pen to hold.
There is a saying that the wife of a writer can never understand he is working when he stares out of the window. There seems to be no evidence of production. But writers need solitude and silence for the thoughts to come, and then there is nothing to do but think.
Before a book is written, weeks and months of apparent inactivity might be spent consolidating ideas. It is a process of synthesis, of thought feeding thought, though others would mistake it as daydreaming. There may be plenty of hours in a day to discipline a fruitful result, other times not enough to leave room. But a level is finally reached at which almost every moment alone, or even silent in company, is used to strengthen this attitude. These ideas enter and exit the head as interviewees applying for a job not yet defined. Connections begin to make a little sense, and further connecting ideas make more sense until there is a foundation for the beginning. And once part A has been established then part B is next and so on, even though the alphabet may be lapped several times before the preparation is complete.
As a lot of this preparation takes place in the head while out walking or awake at night, a lot of notes may be taken and extended upon, which in turn means typing pencilled pages on to Word Processors at a later date. And this is before several revision and correction phases even start- which comes before the final manuscript- which, when sent off will more often than not be rejected. Even when the book is accepted, there is further editing and correction and advice, and this, for the first time, from someone who didn't write a word of it. And just as writers begin to think success is defined by publication, they may still be labelled failures by the critics, who will leave them in a worst position than before they started; a bit like beginning your dreams from the first rung of a ladder only to end up falling down the cellar.
Finally, when editors and critics have had their meat, even posterity judges whether or not his work is good enough to be called literature because no writer writes it as he works.
So because of all this golden potential for failure, anyone who wants to become a writer must want to write. It is as straightforward and daunting as that. Everything else must be sacrificed, or at the very least placed in lower priority. Which is why any other employment for a writer is detrimental and severs the continuity vital to the work.
It is not difficult for writers to perceive a lifetime as short. For the amount of time and effort spent on writing, the return is nearly always pitifully small. Architects are luckier. They'll reflect on their lives with more satisfaction when they look at their contribution to civilization, when they know people can touch their creations. Their work is momentous and visible for all to see. With writers, everything is small; their pens, their words, their books, their social life and even the rooms they write in. It is their ideas that are big and these, fortunately or unfortunately, live only in the imagination.
So for writers there grows an urge to recognise the value of everything and appreciate things taken for granted. To write is to notice the most simple observations. But noticing the simple things in life or in people amplifies everyday existence as a whole. It isn't essential to study the natural history of man, to worship biological creation or search for refuge in a philosophical doctrine. By writing stories well, a particle is taken from a whole that would be too large to comprehend, and placed into a frame which everyone can see and decipher. A translation by simplifying the complicated, or what appears to be complicated. And writers do this subconsciously.
It seems impossible and ridiculous to attempt to invent characters from nothing, to have them say and do things extraordinary enough to make them interesting and different, yet realistic enough to make them believable. It is the character's dissimilarity from his vital familiarity to ordinary people that makes him convincing. To write is to be affected and then affect.
The art of writing can dictate a life, and the life that is dictated to learns to rely and trust ever more on the vocation that might be welcomed but never summoned. It's been said that writing is the hardest job in the world, which may not be true; that it is the most difficult of the arts, which probably is. The hard parts are before the writing starts and in the effort required during the long pauses that occasionally come when the concentration slips. But when free and in good flow, the writing itself is not hard work. It is the reward for hard work.