What made me "a writer"

When I was a late teenager and young adult; I envisaged being "a writer"; by which I meant some kind of creative writer - if not as a living, as a significant side-line to my job. 

Aside from a few comedy sketches for performance in revues, and scientific articles for journals (which were collaborative) I did not "publish anything much in the way of writing until I was about 28; when something "clicked"; and I suddenly became able to write fluently and quickly (and get published, and quite often paid for) essays and journalistic pieces. 

For the next couple of decades I published a great deal of this kind of stuff - and we have in the past couple of days been sorting through many boxes of such material that had been piled-up in various places for many years. 

I found it amazing, and somewhat appalling, to rediscover the sheer quantity and variety of these outpourings. 

Quite aside from a couple of hundred mainstream "papers" and a few books (which were done in relation to my academic job); it seems I also did a very large number of editorials, book reviews, comments, commentaries and columns, in all kinds of places. 

I must have been publishing something every week or two for many years. These were placed in all sorts of publications: prestigious scientific and medical journals, national newspapers and magazines; and also numerous obscure and small-circulation outputs such as literary and cultural "small magazines", professional and trade journals, and local "in house" magazines and newspapers for places I worked (and places I didn't work - e.g. I published scores of things in the Oxford Magazine).  

So I really did end-up as "a writer" - albeit I found my niche in "non fiction" rather than in the poems, plays, short-stories and novels which I attempted to write - and failed to write well - in the first decade of adulthood.  

From 2010; I all-but ceased to do this kind of paper-work, apart from four books done for Buckingham University Press and a handful of scientific papers - and instead began to blog on a daily (actually about 1.5 pieces per day) basis. This blogging amounts to a broadly similar number of words as I used to publish on-paper. 

And, up to now (who knows what comes next) this continues. 

What is strange is that (as I mentioned) it took a good decade of trying before I was able to write; at least I could not before age 28 write in the way I have found enjoyable and straightforward since. 

Partly this was a matter of psychological maturing, partly a matter of finding the form within-which my writing flows; and partly it was the "training" of writing scientific papers, journal articles - which activity made me unselfconscious and gradually take an objective attitude towards what I had written...

As a young would-be writer, I could not tell whether what I had written was any good; because I judged my own writing from the inside, and could not see how it struck other people. 

Once I learned how to do this self-monitoring: learned how to evaluate what I had written by the same standards I would apply to what other people had written - this seemed to provide the break-though I needed.  

It was writing scientific papers (as first author) and then having them critiqued and corrected by my doctoral supervisor, and other research collaborators; that did the trick for me. 

Which I still find surprising! - but that was what happened: that was what made "a writer" of me (i.e. a writer of the kind I am, and have been).  

Note: The other thing I was good at was teaching. But that was a thing I never needed to learn. I was good at it from the first attempt. This may be hereditary; since there are several good teachers in my family; including father, siblings, and a child.