Lawrence Medina

This short blog post is made more so as a PSA (Public Safety Announcement).

Don’t call yourself an aspiring writer.

This may just be personal bias, because I too am an “aspiring writer”—I mean, I was an aspiring writer.

There is a problem in calling yourself an “aspiring” anything. Aspiring is just another way of calling yourself a procrastinator. If you are doing what you are aspiring to do, the you are not aspiring… You are what you aspire to be.

Does it mean you’re good? Probably not, but maybe it does. The quality, however, is not what I am taking into account today. If you still call yourself an aspiring {INSERT BLANK OF YOUR CHOICE HERE}, then you are not working towards what you want to be.

You may just be daydreaming of becoming what you wish to be and not putting in the effort to become the thing you seek to be.

“Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves.”

Lord Henry Wotton (The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde)

This is not to say that you will become uninteresting if you put your all into your work and writing, but… you’ve got to put your all into it. Don’t dream on or aspire to take on your craft, you must instead pick up the mantle and begin it.

An aspiring writer, never writes. An aspiring artist, never arts it up. To be aspirational is to dream and to never fail, but you’re going to fail.

You’ll fail plenty of times. You’ll probably never stop failing. You must be Sisyphean in your approach to what you do.

No matter what you accomplish, no matter where you fail… There’s still that boulder to push up the mountain. Be Sisyphean in your resolve.

This is all sounding like a motivational post, which is not what I want, but it’s what’s coming out.

Don’t aspire, just do.

Yeah, this means you too.

Yeah, you, the one writing this.