What does it take to become an author?
In my experience there was one critical thing that had to happen before
I stood a chance of succeeding as an author. This was simply that I had to make writing my sole and full time occupation.
For most people, including me, this presents a formidable barrier. We all have to make a living. Things changed
in my life when I married my present wife, Stephanie. We decided that neither of us wanted to wind up on social
security and that, between the two of us, I was the one who had a possible way out. So she cheerfully went out
to work, and I stayed home and began to write in earnest. What a wonderful woman she is! She is also my first reader
and the one on whose reaction I judge much of what I do. She is our business manager, and I feel like luck has
finally smiled on me to be married to her. :)
I must also say that my parents, who are not rich by any means, have helped us with financial support when things have gotten rough so that we have not had to abandon this effort and restart it a couple of times. I thank them for that too.
Before this happened I wrote like many other people I know. I wrote in my "spare time". I did this for nearly fifteen years, never ever producing a finished book that even I, in my optimism, regarded as worthy of publication. The reason was simple. My mind was occupied from day to day with my "real profession". I had to carry a great deal of mental stuff from day to day so I would know what I was doing at work. This took up most of my mental capacity. Writing takes up a very large part of my mind, and there wasn't room for both.
My first book was going to be a book for radio enthusiasts on antennas. I am myself a radio enthusiast, and I have an Amateur Radio license. (Ham radio. What does Ham mean? It stands for home amateur.) It was a valid book, as radio is all in the antenna, and there are few books on the subject that anyone but the engineers that wrote them can understand. Add to that my capabilities in what is known as appropriate technology design (using existing things for new purposes), and it would have been worthy of publication. But though I wrote numerous chapters, the whole book just never came to completion. I couldn't approach it as a whole, that took too much of my mental capacity under the circumstances.
What else does it take to write? Well, of course you need to be able to express yourself in a way that people can read and enjoy. And you need to have something to write about that enough people want to read. And you need to get your finished work to the attention of a publisher. We used a literary agent for that part, Finesse Literary Agency. I'm sure you can find it on the Internet. Of course, there are a horde of literary agents.
Another thing I think is important if you're going to write fiction is imagination. I have always had a vivid imagination. In my profession before I took to writing I was a designer and inventor of machinery and technical stuff. To design a new machine, you have to imagine it in three dimensions doing what it will do. You have to be able to judge if its parts are strong enough, light enough, etc. When you have the machine running in your mind, you set it down on paper. Now, writing a novel is more or less exactly the same task. I imagine the setting of the novel and then I imagine the characters doing what they do and saying what they say, and when it feels real enough, I suddenly jump up and write like crazy. I almost never rewrite from drafts, what I write is what winds up in the book, allowing for minor fine tuning of course.
So, that's my experience. Good luck if you're an aspiring writer. Tommy Atkinson