I am a Writer. Are you sure?

"So, since when did you decide to be a writer?"

"Well, I write since I was a little girl."

"Okay, but everybody I know wants to be a writer!"

"Let it be! The person who writes is a writer, the person who doesn't, is not. Simple like that."

"But there is more than that. You can aspire to be a published author. Or a bestselling author. Or a magazine free-lancer writer. Or a professional ghost writer..."

"It doesn't matter. You should aspire to be a good or better writer."

There we go.

Sometimes we writers feel like no one respect us. Every writer likes to be read and to receive critics, more good than bad. The best people to share our experiences might be other writers, that feel how we feel. Between want to be something, and actually be it, there is a long road to travel.

Get where we want as writers is another story. I don't say that to be a pessimist, but if we want to be writers, we need to actually 'WRITE'.

There is no advices towards this area of action. Chances are that all we are taught might work, and it might not. If people don't comment, how do I know if they read it? As writers, we want to write what we want, not what is being sold. That means that there are no answers on how to to be a writer.

I have a friend that wrote a fabulous book. The most of editors and publishers he present his masterpiece, simply turned him down saying that the book was not saleable.

One after the other, repetitively. That is discouraging. Make us skeptic and even wonder about our role as writers. Make us feel like amateurs. Make us feel like everyone else is better than we are.

Like I've done and many great authors I know, some even in the NY bestselling list, he opted for self-publishing, and got to put his work out there. The most important is that he loves his work and is confident of its value.

When we live in a world where everything goes around money and the profit companies can get from your ideas, it's so hard to put out there what we think.

Some days a blank page is so scary and feel like we are climbing a lost mountain in the worse snowstorm. Other days we hate what we wrote that day.

Many times we need to take care of paying the bills, because we sweat so hard about writing our book and publishing, and anybody buys it besides some friends and other writers, and we need to go out of our route and find extra jobs to pay the pile of bills. Or we need marketing our work in order to reach the most people we can for the coming of our next book. This can make us lose the track, stop writing for a while, and get stuck. We all have good and bad days, and they are part of life.

We need to return to the routine and keep writing anyway. Until we finish. Yes, finish! Until our craft is readable, and understood.

In the end, we create our world and it's ours. It will always have someone to tell you what doesn't matter. In the very end, it's always between you and the blank page you are looking at. It's you and your story. Better if you like it and want to write it, and do it well.

Expect rewards for the things we do, or write, is the one way road, and become discouraging. In everything we do in life the most important is embrace the feeling of satisfaction when we get to do our thing.

So write. Photograph. Paint. Run. Cook. It doesn't matter. This happen with everyone, not just writers. As a mother I know that I'm invisible the most of times, but I keep doing everything. Same as a writer, or a photographer.

If I'm happy with who I am and with what I do, Nobody, and I mean Nobody, will make me stop to look back.

Not even myself.