To Every Person Who Thinks They Can't Write And Every Writer Who Has Lost Their Way
When all else fails, just pick up your pen.
Ah yes, writing. Chances are, you either love it or you hate it. But either way, that's no reason to avoid it. Whether it's your job or your arch nemesis, we all have encountered a time when it seemed impossible to write anything good. If you're reading this shaking your head like that's never happened to you before, you're simply lying.
I'm here to tell you being a writer is not as complicated and daunting as it seems. If you don't believe me, then for now just be a reader and you'll understand what I mean.
How to be a writer:
First, try math. When the numbers became multiplication soup, and the letters become the question marks to all of your problems, spit math out and never try it again. Next, try something else. Literally anything else. When the soccer ball hits you in the face, the historical facts strangle your creative brain, and the science experiment blows up, find your pen. Pick up your pen like it's the first piece of food you've seen in two weeks, and your paper is your mouth.
Write the worlds worst song, and know the cheesy lyrics and stupid tune for the rest of your life. Write an annoyed diary entry about your parents who won't stop bugging you to clean this or put away that. Write a poem about a boy who didn't know your name. When you finish the poem, and the boy still doesn't know your name and you're just left with some scribbles on a sheet of paper, move on.
Take some AP classes in high school, and write some sub-par papers but manage to get A's. Decide you like English because you get good grades, which must mean you're a good writer. Write the minimum, but get inspired quickly to write more. Explore more. Take a harder AP class, and realize there's no way to go but up. Those 95's turned into 85's, and you worked hard for those 85's.
Learn that you're still a decent writer, but decent is different than good, and both mean you have a ridiculous amount to learn. Learn what makes you tick. What inspires you to write, what stories you feel compelled to tell. Learn that you hate editing, and you're most honest writing usually comes in short bursts. Learn that the pieces you usually hate most at first, become the ones most true to how you felt. It's okay to be less than picture perfect. In fact, that's what makes a good writer.
To be a writer, you simply have to put a pen to paper and begin to explore the unblazed trails of your brain. You must collect the scariest, happiest, silliest, most private, feelings you've ever had, and write them down. Write down the way your tears made the blue in your eyes stand out like the brightest sky you've ever seen. Write how annoying it is that your parents are always right, and how funny it is that you still try and fight. Write about how good that mac and cheese you just ate was. Write about how sad, happy, angry, or confused you are. And write about the littlest things that made you laugh. Write them down as your head shakes rolling your eyes at your lame words. Then throw the paper in the back of your backpack. Don't look at it for a while.
A while later, take that paper out. Re-open your document from September. When you realize you forgot about all of these feelings you were having, read about them again. Re-read the very words you wrote, and remember how it felt. Feel something. When you feel the pain you had thrown away earlier this year when you laugh at a joke you forgot you made in December when you sigh at a perfect car ride with your best friend that had become a memory, that's when you're a writer.
To be a writer, you must think of everything you would never write down on paper or tell anyone, and then write it. You must go into the deepest paths of your brain, and find the things that stick with you, that intrigue you, that anger you, or that inspire you, and you must write about it and then be able to feel that same feeling whenever you read it. To be a writer you have to leave the fear of writing something wrong, and instead, you have to write it even if it's wrong, but write it with detail, feeling, and emotion.
The second you write something honest, you become a writer.
