Who leads a writer's life? Everyone who writes? Not necessarily. Someone who wants to be a writer? Not always. Someone who feels they have to be. Maybe. Someone who yearns to be published? Hardly.

There are two main components: your motivation has to be rooted in wanting to create and you have to put pen to paper somewhere along the line. It helps if you have something to say because it is essentially a sharing activity (even if the readership turns out to be your executors pouring through your diaries).

Find someone who shares your dreams (but not someone who loves you; they will be required for endless praise and encouragement when it all just becomes too difficult). A fellow writer perhaps who can give constructive criticism and inspiration and ideas in equal measure. Or you may find the diversity of a writing group more helpful. Find out what suits you best and learn to trust your work to someone else's scrutiny. Ideally make it mutual; giving feedback can be as instructive as receiving it.

Techniques need to be learnt and the craft honed and polished and there are no shortcuts (there are if you just want to be published however; being famous for something else helps, so do friends or family in the publishing trade and being touchingly young and ridiculously pretty never hurt).

Books abound on the subject of how to write but try to avoid the ones that make it sound quick, easy and painless. It's not. You have to work at it - or get lucky but then you'll probably have to work at the second book/anthology/play, even harder. Believe me the lessons will have to be sweated through at some time, best make it at the beginning when your enthusiasm (or burning ambition) should carry you through the worst.

Read. Read. Read. Make sure you include the best. You could do far worse than picking up any of the anthologies in the Writers at Work series - interviews from The Paris Review. Here you have: Bellow, Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Mailer, Simenon, Pinter, Stoppard, Mary McCarthy, Eudora Welty, Maya Angelou and a host of the other 'greats' telling us about how they approach their work and what they have learnt along the way. Remember that you can pick up tips from someone who is a writer or you can learn from someone who is both a teacher and a great writer. I know where I'd go.

And write. Write, or think about writing, or dream about how your story ends in your new book ,or let the characters live inside your head a little, or keep a journal, or enter competitions, or find a poem or passage from a novel and rewrite it in your own words, or go to evening classes, or attend literary festivals, or enrol on a prestigious Creative Writing MA course, or write thought-provoking and carefully composed letters to your family far away, or detail the plot of your story using index cards, or draw a picture of the subject at the heart of your poem, or read a book about the art of revision.

Just write. Make it happen. Make yourself into who you want to be: a writer, living a writer's life.