15 Ways You Know You Were Born to Write

1. You include an SASE with all personal correspondence.

2. You think the Bible should be reset in 12-point Courier.

3. It drives you crazy that your friends don’t take an extra minute to get the grammar and punctuation of their e-mails right.

4. You encourage your six-year-old to copyright the story he wrote at school.

5. You can recite return postage rates for London, New York, Los Angeles and Guam.

6. Someone mentions pickle juice, and your first thought is, “Pickle Juice – that’s a good title for a novel.”

7. You feel sex ranks a distant second to the sensation of holding a solid felt tip in your hand.

8. You think baseball players should feel they’re doing well if they get a hit every thirty at-bats.

9. You have four separate novels you’d like to get to, ten short stories, two dozen articles, and enough screenplays to bury a small village.

10. You fall in love based on proper use of syntax.

11. If your house were on fire, you’d save your copy of Writer’s Market first, your grandmother’s jewellery second.

12. You couldn’t balance a checkbook if your life depended on it, but your submission log is cross-referenced three different ways and goes back to 1986.

13. Your outgoing message says, “Hi, I’m not here right now. Please leave a query and the synopsis of your proposed message, and I’ll let you know whether to call back.”

14. You’d rather meet Stephen King than Gandhi.

15. You see an average man sitting on a normal bench on a regular day and suddenly feel compelled to write a story about it.

Writer's Digest 

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I.J. Schecter
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Toronto, ON M6C 3N2
(416) 803-9847

© I.J. Schecter 2003