First, you go to med school.

Doctoring begins long, long before you see your first patient. It begins when you take AP Chemistry in high school, when you score high (or don’t) on the ACT, when you join the Future Physicians of America club or start calculating the number of hours you’ll be in school and the number of dollars you’ll owe at the end of it, then dividing that by the number of hours you’ll have to work before you pay it all off…

Writing is as long of a process, longer. The ability to write is the ability to communicate, and you start learning communication on day 1. You cry, someone picks you up. Soon you learn to smile, to laugh, to whine, to scream.

Then you pick up words: baby babble. The big faces always produce these sounds, and you start making sounds back. You don’t get any literal meaning to the sounds at first, but you’re still communicating.

Then you start to hear different sounds. You start to understand that this particular sound means something, a thing, and not something else. Da-da means that person; Ma-ma means another one entirely.

Once you make that connection, you notice all sorts of these sounds are unique and they all have different meanings. Soon you’re imitating individual sounds at appropriate times. You say “Da da” and lift your arms up to him, and he picks you up! Ha! It worked! What else can you get them to do with this amazing new ability?

Answer: almost anything. Language is powerful, and those who can use language can persuade, indoctrinate, deceive, enlighten, inspire, teach.

There’s only one way to learn how to write. You can look at language and talk about how to use it as a writer. You can do some talking and reading and discussing and researching; great activities, writerly ones. But not the key.

Because if you want to be a writer, there’s only one way to do it: write. Writing is not mysterious, mystical, a secret club only certain people can join. Anyone can write adequately; almost anyone can write well, given some instruction and practice and a good bit of effort.

Writing is a process different than something just black and white. It isn’t about a right way and wrong way, and you’ll never get to perfection as a writer. You can always improve; you can always get better. That’s why we can do things like have week-long camps and multiple blogs and online courses and thousands of books about writing and not just end up saying the same things over and over again.

That’s why, as a teacher, it doesn’t get boring to me to teach the same concepts and work with students, because each student responds differently, brings a different reaction, produces a different work. Writing is individual, subtle, an art.

Let’s go back to the med school/doctoring analogy. As a full-fledged, Ph.d’ed, paid-off-your-debts Doctor, you get to make decisions about your practice, your work, the cases that come before you. You’ve earned the right to make the calls.

Before that, though, in med school, in your internship, you get to observe, work, watch, learn, and listen to others make the calls. You might disagree. You might think of a thousand better ways to do things. You can make suggestions. But you’re not in charge.

Everybody has to pay dues at some point. No matter what your profession, you have to go through a period of learning in order to get to the period of working, your way, at the thing you’ve chosen to do. And the best way to learn how to write is to sit down – butt to chair – and write.