There is more to becoming a        

 writer than just writing

 No matter how late you start writing, once you do, soon, you and others will realize that you were born to write. You become an inhabitant of the fantasy world.

Nature is your first love now, for it has the best metaphors. Everything that nature does is poetry. The clouds piercing through a mountain; the leaves wanting to run with the wind but the tree pulls them back like a mother forbidding her child from running after a kite; the conversation that ensues when the wind sighs and the water respond with a stir. Silence, too, now speaks to you. You watch the cooing and pampering pair of pigeons and try to decode their whispering and moans.

When alone, you talk to yourself and to your characters. They become your friends. You can see their expressions, their gestures, their actions. You instruct and guide them. You are never alone.

You become more observant. You see everything you come across keenly, everything that happens to you and everything that takes place around you as a potential plot for your story.

Loneliness stops haunting you. You seek solitude now.

Your perspective of others changes for good. You tend to understand and respect views of others. You may not agree but the writer in you has extended the horizon of your thoughts. As a storyteller, you give birth to characters of different moods, different temperaments, different ideologies and different opinions. They all exist in you. Thus, in a way, your mind accommodates several beings in it, but you are one. You are, now, a mixture of all distinct moods and opinions. You begin to accept more things than you refuse. 

You listen more, you observe more and you try to learn about new things.

 You do research for your write-ups. You travel. You meet people. These are not raw materials for your literary work. They are inputs to strengthen your thoughts and imagination. You may use them in a single story but that knowledge is not evanescent. More you write, more informed you become.

Quest of getting your work published is even more fruitful.

Your notion that God is indifferent or is the busiest will change when you will submit your work to a publisher. No harm, in the long run, it’s for your good. They skim out impatience from you. You will learn to cure and calm down anxiety. Also, you will learn to accept rejection. The manuscript which you think is an out of world thing is trash to them. Rejections are the antidote to the poisonous ego. Gradually, hearing rejection becomes the part of your life. That makes you practical, accommodating and realistic with peers and family.

After your work is published, another offering that your vocation of writing may bring to you is criticism. In the beginning, you won’t embrace it, but you’ve to learn to accept what your critics say. Critics are the truest readers and judges. Somebody pointing out your shortcomings is your well-wisher. They help you to improve. Your fans would never do that.

Okay, you may or may not accept the critique, but you have to learn to brook the criticism. And when you start doing that, you learn to control your anger, your tone, and your speech. You begin choosing your words wisely when you answer your critics; again, nothing to lose anything in the bargain.

You are a better person now.