My Writing Story
During my later elementary school years and well into middle school, I remember telling people I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. An avid reader as a kid, I found immense joy within the pages of the books I read and welcomed the ways they could effortlessly transport me to distant places and times, allowing me to experience challenges and adventures from the safe distance offered by my upper middle class life. My parents encouraged my reading habit. Family dinners out would frequently be followed by trips to nearby bookstores where we’d all spend an hour or so perusing stacks of books and each pick one out to buy. “Books are one thing you can never have too many of,” my mom would say. In the summertime I used to climb into the birch tree outside my bedroom window and spend hours up there reading. I knew it wasn’t good to sit for too long so I’d try to make myself climb down every other chapter to run a lap around our pond before climbing back up in the tree to continue reading. Sometimes I didn’t stick to that rule because, how can you just put down Little Women when you find out just how sick Jo is? You can’t.
I also knew I liked writing at a young age. Around the age of six or seven I began writing simple poems that I would type into a word document and then paste over multi-colored powerpoint slides whose aesthetic now screams late nineties. From eight to eleven I began writing plays and short stories, inspired by the school and community theatre groups I belonged to. When my family moved to California, I started writing screenplays, if you could call them that, which my friends and I turned into cringeworthy movies. I found great joy in almost any and every creative writing project thrown my way at school. From poems to personal essays and short stories, I loved it all and would spend way too much time on my english homework because it was genuinely fun and put me into that much discussed and sought after flow state. I remember feeling elated when I received the “Most likely to Become an Author” superlative in my eighth grade year book, thinking to myself that perhaps others saw in me a future I’d seen for myself. But, as I got into my later high school years I lost interest in writing as a creative outlet. Beginning to think more seriously about the, what do you want to be when you grow up question, I started to see creative writing as an all or nothing pursuit: Only professional writers spend a meaningful amount of time writing, I thought. And, creative writing is an unstable career option, one that wouldn’t allow me to give back to society in a meaningful way. I’ve since unlearned much of what I then believed about writing. While there’s certainly instability in many creative writing careers great writers give back to their readers in so many ways. They spark joy and laughter and give their readers an outlet to escape the stresses of everyday life. They help us remember the past so we can make sense of and improve upon our collective future. They use story as a tool to build empathy, allowing us to see bits of ourselves reflected in the lives of others and pushing us to think about society and our place within it through a medium that’s often more accessible and provoking than any chart or figure.
Further, creative writing is far from an all or nothing pursuit. I’ve become a firm believer that we are all writers and storytellers in our own way whether we write our stories down or not. We each have a distinct voice that we use to recount our memories, share our ideas, and imagine new possibilities. Writing can help clarify and strengthen that voice. Over the past two years I’ve begun to rediscover and embrace creative writing as a hobby and have written some fictional short stories, a few real short stories / personal essays, and even a couple of poems. I’ve intentionally tried to not be too prescriptive, allowing myself to write what’s on my mind free from any stylistic or genre constraints. Until now, I’ve only shared my writing with immediate family. A combination of perfectionism and fear of what others might think has driven me to believe my work isn’t complete or polished enough to share more broadly. I’ve since come to realize that my work may never feel “done” enough to share more broadly and that only by sharing it will I start to become a more confident, authentic, and all around better writer. I also hope that sharing my work will help me hold myself accountable to writing more and developing a more active writing practice. And of course, I hope you enjoy some of what you read and may even be inspired to take up writing as a hobby or to share your writing with others.
