Am I a Writer?

I got enrolled in technical writing bootcamp by Hashnode and had the first session yesterday. It was amazing with lots of tips and advice from Quincy Larson and Edidiong Asikpo. I'm really thankful to Hashnode for organizing this amazing bootcamp.

At the end of the first day, Sam Sycamore asked us to share our stories of becoming writers.

This request made me think about my writing journey. And I asked myself, "am I really a writer?"

I've never considered myself a writer. Maybe because of the poor marks I got for my essays when I was in school 😄 Or maybe because of all the great stories I read since childhood, I considered it a superpower. To craft something beautifully with words takes lots of creativity and imagination.

I like to call myself a bookworm since one of the most favorite things I like to do is curl up with a book. Over time, I realized that I wanted to share my thoughts on the books I read; I wanted to have a place to log my thoughts, refer them later, and share with others. So I started my first blog 10 years ago to share my thoughts on books and movies I watch.

Some days, I really struggled with writing. I didn't always have the motivation to write something whenever I finished a book or a movie. So I slowly got into a rhythm of writing a blog post per month which took me considerable time to write and edit. Also, there were times that I wrote and published a post within 30 minutes during this time as well.

Here is one of the posts I wrote in a flash and published.

With my writing rhythm, I realized that I don't want to write something for the sake of writing. It always has to be something that I'm passionate about. And the most important thing about writing for me was sharing that passion with others. So I started writing about the books I really wanted to share with others and movies I really enjoyed.

While writing on my personal blog, I started writing about project management on Medium and LinkedIn when I started my career as a Project Manager. There were times that I deleted some of the posts that I published after thinking that those were not good enough. On the other hand, I really wish that I kept them to see my progress.

Anyhow, I realized that writing is one of the best ways to share my knowledge with others. And over time, I started to enjoy writing more and more.

So this has been my writing journey so far!

Now, with my web development learning journey, I want to share my learnings with others, help others learn about complicated topics, or share my view on a specific technology, specific method, and so forth. So I recently started my Hashnode blog a couple of months ago. And I will be continuing this journey while trying to get better at writing!

So a question to you, do you think that I'm a writer? 😄