My mother is a published author. My biological father drank himself to death a couple of weeks after being rejected by several publishing houses in a row. As a young man, he was not a bad writer. He initially wrote well enough to get himself laid on a regular basis in the 50s and 60s. So you might say that I came upon the writing bug honestly.

Something happened to my father‘s writing as he progressed through his life, though. He was 47 when he died, but by the time he reached his early 40s, his writing had quite frankly devolved into something fairly unreadable. My father was an alcoholic. As his alcoholism progressed, while he continued to be a prolific writer with lots of hope but marginal ability, his worldview came through on the pages. The problem? When your worldview is coming from the bottom of a bottle of Johnny Walker, the ink on every page ends up saturated by booze. 

As authors, we can’t help but to write worlds that we understand. No matter how much we may try to show a world with dissimilarities to our own, our values and our unique understandings of things always shine through. 

I recently said that the most important thing a writer can do to be a good writer is read. In fact, I said that good writers need to be great readers. I stand by that, but the sister truth is this: easily the second most important thing a writer can do to become a good writer is to get their mental health in check. The stories of half crazed, drug addicted, booze filled writers creating masterpieces with a little help from a friend make for good romantasy, but the truth of this is that it makes for shitty writing. 

In order to write well, you have to understand the world around you—how it works. You have to understand how people work. You have to understand how you work. You have to come to a place in life where you accept, without excuse or exaggeration, that these things just are what they are. There will not be a lot of major, sweeping change. We all work with what we’ve got to create the best semblance of happiness and sanity we can.

As writers, we also do our level best to impart our own views through our characters while at the same time finding the empathy that allows them to become themselves. 

Empathy is a direct result of coming to terms with who we really are versus who we think we’re meant to be versus who the world told us we should be—and deciding that’s OK. When we learn to forgive ourselves, we can’t help but extend grace to others. The easiest path to the extension of grace is the experience of grace—realizing that oftentimes in life we deserve worse than we get for the decisions we make rather than harboring hatred over those few times in life that we failed to get proper respect or homage for our accomplishments.

This is crucial because in order to write characters who are different from ourselves, we have to understand people outside of ourselves, which means we have to feel life in their shoes via the situations that climb out of our imaginations and onto the page.

So, of course— if you want to be a good writer, be a great reader. But also make sure you’ve got your worldview right. Make sure you’re mentally balanced. Make sure you have a proper respect for not only what’s right with you but also what’s wrong. The more complete you are as a person, the more complete your characters will be on a page. The closer to the reality of human perception you are, the closer you will be to finding your audience. Because at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about: readers want to engage with characters they understand.