I made a stupid mistake on a tweet from my iPhone on the worst possible tweet where I took the chance to say I was looking for work as a strategist, community manager and or writer and one of the hashtags I used I spelled wrong it was marketing and I spelled it “makreting” or something close to that. Man that was a bad one and a total fail on my part but it got me thinking about what it means to be a writer? I’ve never really considered myself a writer writer because I have not been trained as one and did it because I fell into it. My grammar isn’t bad but it definitely needs work and I find that Office has made me slack off in spellchecking over the years. It kills me when writing long articles or reports because mistakes get lost in the sea of words.
So what does it mean to be a writer to me? It means that words in all their form have meaning. It means that my strength is also a weakness and that I am but a student to it’s whims. I have a hard time correcting my own work because I see what I write how I saw it in my head which makes it that much harder to spot the mistakes that would be obvious to anyone else. It is not that I can’t do it but only that it can be a struggle to get through which is why in order to do it better I break things down that make it easier to digest and recognize the errors. I forget sometimes but I am trying to take that approach more and more.
I am not a writer with a capital “W” and it is not what I ever emphasize. I consider myself an amateur writer who does it because I enjoy it because it is a chance to get something down. On twitter I make loads of mistakes because the touch typing is my villain. It stocks me Charlie Sheen looking for his next TV appearance. It is waiting when it knows that I need this one out of all others to be right to strike and kick my ass back a few notches.
I can’t fight the mistakes because they will always be there but I can break my sentences down to mitigate them from happening. I can always get that second pair of eyes to see what is hidden from my sight behind the veil. I hope that by owning up to my faults and looking to get better and climb the mountain is worth the fall from time to time because that is a risk worth taking, a risk that is a gap that asks to be crossed and while I have fallen more times that I wish to know in the search the goal will have a taste of ambrosia because I had to earn it inch by inch.
That is what my faults, failures and mistakes mean to me. They can be something as simple as spelling marketing wrong on a tweet or the mistakes in this post but they are mine, I need them because they show me how far I have to go to earn the way through the race we all run every day.
So I guess I am a writer with a small “m” who is learning the ways of the writing world who is trying to get a little better each day when I start typing or put pen to paper. If I can do that then the mistakes are worth the effort to turn it from something that most would see as a minus to something that is a plus because I used it to inch up ever closer to the goal I have yet to define. (There are probably loads of mistakes in this but because of what I am writing I choose to leave them in because I think it just makes sense for this in context.)