My youngest son loves birds. His first word was “meadowlark.” No kidding. When he was three, my grandmother called to ask him about a bird call she’d heard while walking in her neighborhood. She described it, tried to whistle a bit of it for him over the phone. He not only identified it, but also rattled off a couple paragraphs from a bird guide that he enjoyed having read to him.
I’m not nearly so interested in birds. I wish I could fly, but that is about the extent of my fascination with them. But in his love of them, I have read a whole host of books about birds--their migration patterns, their calls, their dietary habits, their stages of development, etc. A fledgling is a bird that has hatched but is still growing and has yet to reach the stage at which it is able to fly. It may test its wings and feel restless being stuck in the nest, but it's not completely out on its own.
I think this is a term better suited for one who is in the early stages of developing a public writing practice (I am reluctant to use the term “career” here, as many writers I’ve had the privilege of interacting with do so because they love it, but make very little, if any, money writing) than “aspiring writer/author” (a term I most often hear applied to such people). Aspiring suggests that being “a writer” is something one hopes to achieve at some point in the future. It speaks of the “not yet.” But, as many of these writers have said, if you write, you’re a writer. There is no qualification that one must meet in order to be considered a “writer” beyond a willingness to (literally or figuratively) put pen to paper.
An owl fledgling is still an owl, regardless of whether or not it can fly yet. It isn’t aspiring to become an owl when it is finally able to fly; it is one already. In the same way, I consider myself a fledgling writer, because I am still learning how to do “being a writer” well. There’s so much I don’t know, and so much that I’m sure I’m doing wrong (including quite a bit I probably don’t even know that I’m doing wrong). But I write. And hopefully I will do it often enough that I no longer feel like a fledgling, trying to learn my way in the literary world, and am able to drop the modifier and simply be a writer.
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