If you haven’t read Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Trading Stories” in The New Yorker, I suggest you do it now. It’s one of those pieces that made me exhale and remember why I love writing. And, most importantly, it reminded me that I am a writer (even when I feel like a hack).
This is my favorite part, the part that made me nod with the most gusto:
“It was not in my nature to be an assertive person. I was used to looking to others for guidance, for influence, sometimes for the most basic cues of life. And yet writing stories is one of the most assertive things a person can do. Fiction is an act of willfulness, a deliberate effort to reconceive, to rearrange, to reconstitute nothing short of reality itself. Even among the most reluctant and doubtful of writers, this willfulness must emerge. Being a writer means taking the leap from listening to saying, ‘Listen to me.'”