Letters to the Editor
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Do you really think best selling authors who are also terrific writers, like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, learned to write first and then decided to think up some ideas?
I wouldn't dare suggest the process is as literal and causal as you've explicated here, but I suppose the simplest answer is that, yes, I do believe that, in a roundabout way. The way you've described this process (which is a bizarre close-reading of what it is I'd written) seems to indicate that you could write blandly without thinking, or perhaps that you could learn to write without having ideas, or that "think[ing] up ideas" is somehow fundamentally separated from the process of writing. I didn't say that at all. That's an odd way of looking at the process and function of writing.
I'm not sure how Christopher Hitchens gets his writing done, having never met the man or asked him myself, but I'm going to assume that there are some ideas he has that he can't yet write, that supercede his ability to communicate them. I have thoughts that I can't communicate all the time, and so I've got to make my writing somehow match my ideas, to take what's in my mind and make it so. Ideas are only made explicable by the act of writing.
And you prove my point with your JK Rowling example. Her publisher informed her that she wouldn't make it as a writer, so she found external support to help her along the way. And if, as you suggest, she wrote her first novel while living on unemployment, then she did find a type of external funding - perhaps not very prestigious, but external funding nonetheless.
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I'm a terrible and reticent writer
Which is funny, because in school I was always "that kid" who won awards for creative and non-fiction writing. I was perpetually writing. In college I was certain I'd be a writer, and even my usually pessimistic English profesors got me enrolled in the Writer's Workshop classes they taught when I was a lowly undergrad.
Yeah...THAT Writer's Workshop. I mean I was THAT kind of a writer.
I even became an English teacher, helping teenagers get better at critical thinking, and narrative forms and all that jazz. I edited a bit at some print and online magazines.
I was creative with the words, yo'. Even if they weren't my own, I could lasso those suckers into...um...a corrall, or something. Whatever it is you do after you lasso something.
Which is hilarious because I havent written anything recreationally in, goodness, years. Maybe a decade. I get intimidated when I have to write copy for work. I find myself saying such odd phrases as "I'm not great with constructing marketing copy. I'm not the writer in the office."
And I'm not.
I'm a little sad about it. I was pretty good back in the day. I occaisionally find some old scrap of writing when I'm moving, or clearing out a box in the closet, and marvel at how I could come up with such clever and charming turns of phrase when I was young and...y'know....clever.
Do you see what I mean? Sometimes it just dies.
It's ok though. I like my job. Sometimes I miss having something to do like that...whiling away the day writing on the riverbank when I was in college construct some of my best memories from that time in my history. I could go to the beach now to write, but if I got to the beach I'm likely to read, or nap, or maybe jog or join an impromptu tai chi classs, or work on my tan, or look at what other people are wearing and doing to get a sense of what people are consuming. Or maybe I'd rather sip wine and just relax looking at the water.
I just don't write. I lost all the words.
It's ok. It's really really ok. The narrative will continue whether you note it cleverly or not.
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Mr. or Ms. Apfel, as the case may be
You said, "I can write, speak, and think in my own language, better than anyone else I know. I'm not saying that out of a place of arrogance - I'm stating that as point of fact."
Mama used to tell me, whenever I said anything as stupid as that, "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back."
Methinks you could stand a tad more didacticism, auto or otherwise.
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Get over it and just do it- or don't
The problem with a lot of creative people is the agony they put themselves through by over thinking everything. It's not enough to write and express and explore the world through the act of writing- everyone has to be a WRITER!!!!!!!
If you care enough to dedicate yourself to writing (or any other creative pirsuit) just DO IT and focus on it with care and conviction, and when you've done it, do what you can to put it out into the world.
I went through my undergrad years surrounded by students and faculty who over analyzed every little detail and as a result- they got no work done.
If you want to write, write. If you don't, take a walk or see a movie. It's up to you either way.
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The problem with an existential crisis...
...is that it is usually a result of too much time on one's hands without any action. A fabrication, a luxury, a privileged invention. (This sounds a lot like writing.) If one were in immediate danger, not in the position where it is a luxury to write or not write or lament one or the other of those states, one would not have the opportunity to invent a crisis which, to my mind, can be solved easily. To that end, I offer my own interpretation.
Letter Writer: do you want to write or not? If the answer is affirmative for the former, then sit your butt down at a desk, on the floor, in a sauna, wherever it is you feel would be most conducive to putting pen to paper and joining words or tapping keys with letters that add up to more than conjoined consonants and vowels. Hang upside down and talk into a headset and transcribe the words later. If you're waiting for the perfect moment, the right scenery, the ideal mood, note that "now" is the best choice for "now's" writing. Write about how much you hate writing about not being able to write. Make a list of words you hate/like/don't understand. Write about how much you hate feeling turned off to writing because of a few meaningless jerks; about how you won't write in rebellion of their opinions, or how you will keep on despite them. The point is, you can write; else, what is the product in front of you? You might not like what you write, or how you write, or what little of grand importance or small revelation you have flowing from your mind to your hand; but the truth is, you can write. There you go.
If you don't want to write anymore, don't. When one grows up, things change. Reality comes in. Writing isn't all romantic, tower-trapped people penning and pining away or drinking disaffected by anything except art on some Left Bank. It's not all drunks, tragedy, and ruffle blouses. If writing doesn't amaze you anymore, if you are not compelled to do it like some junkie starved for the next hit, maybe it's just not your thing. And that is OK. It just is. People give up dreams, get new ones. The trick is to find out, then, if you don't want to write, then what do you want to do? And DO it.
That said, are you feeling guilty you aren't writing or surprised you aren't writing? That should clue you in on something. You should similarly take notice if you are feeling the gleeful rebellion of someone who cut an obligation or class when you are not writing. That you are concerned about not writing to begin with points strongly to where you might want to be going now. There's an open desk in the corner...
Fellow writers and Writers and writertypes and nonwriters (if one falls into the first classification, one is bound to stray into the others at times, often by the self-castigation which unfortunately checks and fabulously spurs such individuals), it's a choice we make everyday. I am not a writer everyday, I am almost never a Writer, I disdain writertypes when it is merely a moody affected affliction based on the elevated stereotype of the tortured artist, and I am often, these days, a perverse nonwriter. Life is mutable. Occupations and pastimes change. Do or do not. If a writer is simply one who writes, without the further qualifications of the establishment of skill, talent, and creativity wrought out of subjective analyses based on heralded, canonical subjective conclusions, then Letter Writer, you are a writer, as are we all. Deal with it--Gracefully, spitefully, prolifically, anxiously whatever fits your style.