A Piece Of Advice For Writers Who Only Recently Embraced Writing As A Career

6 min readNov 21, 2020

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Coming from a technical background, I should have ended up being a programmer — but I didn’t. Thanks to the Harry Potter series, and JK Rowling, the author of this series.

I started reading in the third year of my graduation, but I had no plan of taking writing as a career until I read the Harry Potter series. — I have lost the count of how many times I have read Harry Potter books.

But the more I read this series, the more I feel in love with JK Rowling’s writing style — she’s from a different planet, I have read around 100 books in last two years and to me, Harry Potter series is unmatchable.

So my writing journey started from writing fiction — or I should say Harry Potter fanfiction. I was shy to publish my work on my Facebook wall, so instead, I published it in a literary group where nobody knew me.

I thought nobody would read this shit, but it turned out people loved those write ups. Some even approached me to take permission for sharing my work. My first ever fanfiction was liked by hundreds of people, some even advised me to write a complete series of Harry Potter fanfiction.

I discovered a writer inside me and tried to write poetry and short stories as well. I made new friends, found literary platforms on Facebook posting my work.

And by then, I had made up my mind that I’m going to be a writer. But I had no mentor, so I learnt things the hard way. I was exploited, misguided, and had no idea how things work in this industry

And yes, I made mistakes that I don’t want you to make if you have recently embarked on this testing journey.

Write Daily

Practice makes a man perfect. This might be true for other things in the world but not for writing. As a writer, you’ll never be perfect because there’ll always be someone who’ll not agree with your work. But, you must keep practising.

Set up realistic writing goals. Write daily — no matter how confident you feel that you can easily write 2000 words a day, show it by doing it.

We all fall prey to such illusions that we don’t need to practice, “I’m only going to write when I find some paid work.” But 90% of the time we are wrong. When we get paid work, we don’t know how to write because we haven’t been practising.

Read Whatever You Like

I doubt such people who claim to be writers but don’t read. How is it possible that someone with no interest in reading would write well? I mean reading serves as a fuel/energy for us — it’s equivalent to someone claiming his car can run without fuel. Will you believe such a person?

Without replenishing our mind with new ideas, is it possible to write? Read, whatever you find. Be it a blog post, Facebook post, news articles, or even fiction.

People often ask,” Does reading fiction helps in becoming a better writer?”

Take my example, I love reading fiction more than self-help books. And when I’m reading fiction, I lost track of the time. And not to mention, how well I sleep the night when I read fiction before going to bed.

Had I kept reading only self-help books, I won’t be a writer today. It was a Harry Potter series that made me a writer.

Find A Mentor

This should have been mentioned at the top, but the problem is it is hard to find a mentor if you are a non-native writer. And most of the mentors charge hefty courses fees in native countries.

If you know someone who’s successful as a writer and chances are he/she would be happy to mentor you, then don’t waste more time and get in touch with them.

Having a mentor helps you to minimize your struggle and avoid the mistakes they made in their journey. You are better off this way instead of learning things on your own, the hard way.

And if, like me, you don’t have a mentor, there a plethora of resources available on the internet to hone your writing skills. You just need to be honest with yourself.

A Piece Of Advice For Writers Who Only Recently Embraced Writing As A Career

Write Daily

Read Whatever You Like

Find A Mentor

Written by Rstahmid