As a publisher, editor and "multi-award-winning author," I'm often asked by writers aspiring to become authors, what I recommend to help make the transition easier or more effective. The answer is a bit like a keen amateur dancer asking how to become a professional dancer. The answer is, there is no one answer I know other than, if you're a dancer, dancing your heart out every moment of your life, and, if you're a writer, writing your heart out every moment of your life and
showing what you're doing to as many prospective audience as possible. But there is an intangible, and because it's such, it's not easy to put into words. Luckily, there are several ways to experience this intangible. One, for instance, is to go watch "The Grand Hotel Budapest."
If you can watch this movie and somehow, empathically perhaps, "get it," then you can at least experience this intangible. It's something akin to laughing at yourself laughing at yourself, and if there is such an emotion, then this is part of what is at the heart to me) of transitioning from writer to author. The intangible part. True, one has to write and write and write a lot, and show it to as many prospective readers as possible, but one has to be able to see and hear their reactions while laughing at yourself laughing at yourself. I sometimes imagine that I'm putting on an armadillo writer's jacket, like the Fonz might wear, when I'm showing my work to others. That way, I can see and hear the critiques but they bounce off me, without their "edge" ever cutting into my feelings about myself. Call it protecting my inner child, or protecting my creative vanity (any artist has to have this at their core in order to have the necessary chutzpah -- the audacity -- to believe he or she could ever actually "make it").
It's time to stop analyzing and suggesting and chuckle once again at recalling various scenes in the movie -- enjoying re-experiencing that intangible element that makes an author, or a dancer, or a painter, or a singer, or an actor what he or she is.
