Whether you are an artsy and emotional millennial who visits coffee-shops five times a week or a middle-aged body-builder with inch-thick chest hair who shovels protein powder and makes babies cry only with his presence, you are a writer. Contrary to what people so often assume, writing, in all of its forms, is not restricted to the emotionally expressive.
From short stories, to poetry, to songs, to short articles like this one, writing is one of the easiest and most worthwhile forms of expression. Plucking the ideas in your head and pouring them onto a page is both satisfying and worthwhile. But too often we are haunted by the fears of writing: ‘I don’t have the right words’, ‘I’m not good at that sort of thing’, ‘I don’t even know what to write about’, and the list goes on. My challenge to anyone who blockades themselves from writing, for any of these reasons, is this: just start writing. Coming from someone who constantly doesn’t know what he’s even writing about until he’s already written three paragraphs, I can say that overcoming these fears is easier done than said. In every single person, there is a head packed with good material for writing. Everyone has something worth saying. When you simply just begin to write, and let words spill out that were bottled up in your mind, you’ll be surprised what will eventually come out. Most of the time, it comes out as nonsense when you first start. I have a journal with pages full of obscure babbling until it finally reaches a gold nugget of thought. And I’ve crossed a lot of things out. And that’s okay. But merely crossing the yellow tape and beginning to write and warming yourself up, getting comfortable with accessing what’s inside and expressing it with words, will eventually lead you to something beautiful.
Writing is a process. It’s not something that always comes out immediately like a golden egg hatched from your mind. Sure, sometimes it does, but sometimes it also works more like an assembly line, your thoughts travelling across a conveyor belt piece by piece until it’s finally assembled into something functional and coherent. Don’t be intimidated or uncomfortable with the fear surrounding expression, and avoid comparison. Everyone has something worth saying, and the easiest way to overcome the fear of writing, is to just start writing.
