A couple years ago, I started saving quotes by writers – kind of like Rachel Toor refers to in her article on The Chronicle of Higher Education. I wasn’t writing nowhere near as consistently as I am now (and by “nowhere near” I mean that in the way people do when they’re trying to salvage a little bit of their dignity to cover up that they really mean they weren’t even a dot on Google Maps.

The books of Ben Mezrich, as pictured on his website.

Traipsing through my old file today, I found this quote by Ben Mezrich from a post on Yahoo!:

“The best advice I got was finish it.  Write, write, write because if you’re a writer you have to write every day – as much as you can – and everything else kind of just falls to the side. You have to obsessive,” the author Ben Mezrich.

Mezrich is the author of a small army of books, the likes of which would not fit in my screenshot no matter how much I zoomed out.  Though some critics have been less than warm to Mezrich, (Janet Maslin called him a “baloney artist” in The New York Times), that doesn’t deter me from doubting the value in his quote.

Like writing is a process, so is becoming a person who can say “I’m a writer” without feeling like a first-class fraud, but it can be done. Step one: write. Step two: write obsessively.

Then, you’ll be an obsessed writer with your own army – whether they’re sitting on bookshelves at Barnes and Noble or as finished manuscripts in your desk drawer.