Writers are like dust. They are everywhere.

Writing is not a gift, but a skill. Most people can and should write.

First: a gift would be the “innate aptitude to do something difficult or rare”, but we know that we achieve much more than our accomplishments, thus, talent without execution is nothing.

That's why I prefer the term skill: because you can learn and improve. We learn to walk, talk, write, sew, drive, cook, count, and draw. In some things, we are average, in those that receive our dedication, we are better. If we train, we can improve, even without being “born for”. As long as your writing boils down to emojis because, you, ñ, etc., your communication will not take off.

When I say that writers are everywhere, I'm not talking about the names on the shelves, but the messages you love, important emails, delegating a task and having a conversation about a difficult topic with your relative or your children. Writing helps to put one word after another, like a jigsaw puzzle — see what fits, and what doesn't if the picture shape makes sense.

So, I say: everyone should write. To put ideas in a place (which is different from IN a place). Taking the hurricane that is in the mind and grounding it in the written word makes it easier to look, think about, make decisions, and say what you want.

“But there are people who are into letters, there are people who are into numbers”. How many people do you know who express thoughts and feelings in numbers? So, it is. As an original “humanities person,” I say: I got good at statistics when I threw that dichotomy in the trash.

My challenge for you today: write FIVE LINES about a part of your ′′ mental hurricane ′′—it could be a conversation, a feeling, a problem, a decision — and then tell me here how the experience was.

In the excerpt from “The Artist's Way”, Julia Cameron says: “Like cockroaches, artists are everywhere”, speaking of Riverside Drive. I adapted it because I don't live in NY and I hate cockroaches.