What Makes You Think You Can Write?

In her memoir, A Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas muses over the question, "What makes you think you can write?" and because she's Abigail Thomas, her answer is gold:

"I didn't start writing until I was forty-seven. I had always wanted to write, but thought you needed a degree, or a membership in a club nobody had asked me to join. I thought God had to touch you on the forehead, I thought you needed to have something specific to say, something important, and I thought you needed all that laid out from the git-go. It was a long time before I realized that you don't have to start right, you just have to strart. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over your own shoulder. You idiot, I would say to myself after half a page. What makes you think you can write, and then I'd crumple it up and aim for the watebasket. Then one day somebody told me a story about a daughter at her mother's funeral, and something in the story caught in my mind and wouldn't let go of me. I tried to write it and failed, but instead of throwing it away (you idiot, give it up), I tried again from a different angle. I realized that I had been imitating the voice of the woman who told me the story, but it didn't ring true coming from me. I decided to make the funeral my own, and to imagine one of my daughters as the narrator, and after three hours I had three pages that I actually liked. I was off and running. For the first time a story was more important than my ego, and the know-it-all-voice that told me not to bother held no sway."