Everyone wants to be a writer. At least, it seems that way. Few get to write for a living. But people so love to work with words that they are often drawn to occupations where they are dealing with other people’s words, even if they aren’t writing themselves.

I remember that when I worked as a science editor, every couple of years I would recruit an assistant editor. It was not a high-paying or terribly interesting job: it basically consisted of the bits of my job that I found too boring to do myself. It was also a training/stepping-stone job for someone who wanted to begin a career in editing. We’d get lots of applicants. Lots. My bosses and I would sift through the 200+ CVs, and they would flag people with PhDs and firsts or 2:1s from Oxford and Cambridge, while I’d pick those to interview who I actually thought would be a good fit for the job. We’d interview, give a short editorial test, and I’d select someone who had some aptitude, and who I thought would survive sharing an office with me . People love to work with words.

I’m lucky. I now write for a living, and I have an amazing degree of freedom concerning what I write about. But it’s only recently that I’ve begun to consider myself a writer. Working as an editor, I was dealing with words all the time, and I have always been a reader. If you want to write, filling your brain with words has to be a good thing. Being able to grapple with ideas is important. And having a personal style that’s accessible to others matters too.

When I began to write for others, I just did it without thinking. Gradually I did more of it, and got paid for it, and then ended up doing even more. I guess I realised I was a writer for the first time when I wrote Wine Science, back in 2004/5. It was a physical book. My copyeditor told me that it was a relief to edit something that was well written. I was surprised, and thrilled. A writer. A proper writer.

With writing, it’s very hard to assess how good you are. Self appraisal is almost impossible, because you get too close to the text. Also, writing is highly personal. Sharing your work with others makes you feel vulnerable. It’s a bit like the first time you sing in front of a friend. You feel exposed. What if I’m actually very bad at this? So a degree of self-confidence is needed, because fear kills good writing. Unless you believe that what you are doing has the potential to be good, then you won’t be fluent. You’ll agonize over every word and phrase. It will be a painful, long labour before your work is finally born. Fear also inhibits the vital attributes of creativity, honesty and bravery that the best writing possesses.

Honesty is important. Your writing needs to have your own voice, not a copied or borrowed one. For sure, you can learn from others, but then you have to integrate what you learn into your own style. Trying to demonstrate cleverness in writing is a huge mistake, I reckon. If you are smart, you aren’t afraid to write in a plain, accessible style. It’s the ideas that are smart, not the big words.

I don’t think there is a universal standard for good writing. Good writing is that which connects with a reader. You will likely not connect with all readers. But the better you are as a writer, the more likely you are to engage a wider audience. Some people have an easy, friendly style, suitable for mass consumption, while others are edgier and riskier, likely to connect with fewer but on a deeper level. It’s fast food versus fine dining. Or safe high-end hotel restaurant menu versus experimental modernist cuisine.

I’m currently writing a book. It’s almost finished. It is one I have wanted to write for a long time, and since it was commissioned in September it has come to fill my thoughts and dominate my life. Having a book on the go gives purpose and structure to what is normally an unstructured way of living. On a personal level, this commission came at just the right time for me, too. I love the process of research, followed by bringing together ideas from different streams of thought, then synthesizing them, and finally writing and re-writing to produce something that ends up being much bigger than the sum of its parts.

So many books are written, and the world is so full of ideas, that it seems perverse to be adding another. Does the world really need another book? Well, I have to believe that I have something useful to offer, or I wouldn’t be motivated to write. Others will judge whether or not all this effort is justified. Once the copy is delivered to the publisher, it will be a case of waiting. This, in my experience, is a frustrating time. The work is done, but there will be a long delay before I get to see the book, and get any response from readers and reviewers. After having invested so much of me into this work, it will be hard not getting anything back for a while. But one of the advantages of this gap is that by the time the book arrives, I will have sufficient distance from the text to be able to read it with fresh eyes.

I like books, and I’d like to be able to write more of them. For now, I must get back to I Taste Red, the current project. Today I’ll be working on how we use prediction and modelling to generate conscious experience, the reason we like the wines we do, and individual differences in perception. Plenty to be getting on with.