The best bit of writing advice I have ever received is to never write about boyfriends.
The reasoning behind this is that after you write the piece, you are going to have to edit it, publish it, and return to it in moments of writer's block. If you two break up, you have to relive the feelings you once had and it’s going to be agonizing.
The same goes for other life events.
I started writing on Odyssey before my freshman year of college. It’s hard to believe a person can change in the span of seven months, but I promise it’s nothing but the truth.
College has a strange way of twisting you into a person you’d never thought you’d be. It’s where you either crack under pressure or shine despite it.
Needless to say, I didn’t start off my career shining. Thus, I literally wrote “diary” articles that I can't help to cringe over now.
I wrote about my feelings of loneliness before I had the chance to make friends.
I wrote about being more “cultured” while ignoring the fact that I haven’t seen the world.
I wrote about finding myself when I still haven’t got a clue.
If I had a chance to delete the posts, I would. It’s one thing to go back to my eighth-grade journal, cringe and rest easy knowing that nobody would see my innermost thoughts.
It’s another thing to realize that over a thousand people have seen them and have access to them.
Now, I don’t have a choice but to take ownership of the articles, to try not to be too critical of every flawed argument, sob story, and false quirky tendencies.
Because they reflect the type of person and writer I used to be.
Further down the line, I’ll have more articles with more substance that I’ll be more proud of. I hope they will have more views.