When I was younger, I wrote because I liked the way my words looked on the page. After I mastered the art of cursive, I couldn’t get enough of my loopy script, and I copied my name endlessly on any piece of paper I came across. Eventually, and seemingly without any pattern of behavior, I began to write more. Words that I liked, words that were either packed with or devoid of meaning, and words that I desperately wanted to show my mom. I can’t say when, but eventually I began to take more pride in the ideas I expressed through writing than the way my words looked on the page. Granted, as a kid my ideas were not explicitly unique in any way. Throughout my early adolescence, I went so far as to store my thoughts and ideas in a journal. It was a persistent hobby, one that became so ingrained in my daily life that if I tried to go to bed without first writing in my journal, I would simply not be able to fall asleep. I’ll be the first to admit that unless you were interested in the detailed one-page account of my daily activities, there was absolutely nothing of value in the words on the page. To the casual observer, there is still little value in those pages, but hindsight has shown me that the value of that pursuit was in how I went about documenting my life and memories growing up.
As an adolescent experiencing the growing pains associated with the teenage years, all of my angst was carefully catalogued in those journals in a way that allowed me to decipher and confront the emotions that seemed much more tumultuous at the time. Had I instead chosen to sit down at the end of each day and go through a mental reel of each day’s events, I am now sure that I wouldn’t have been able to fully confront the events that were shaping my character. The discovery process of writing afforded me the chance to take stock of my thoughts in an organized manner that kept me honest about the occurrences that had the most influence on me. And if that weren’t enough, I can only imagine how unsatisfying it would have been to just reflect on a muddle of thoughts without being able to qualify them in the way that putting pen to paper managed to do for me. What I came to realize was so valuable about those inconsequential jumbles of words was that it had ingrained in me a dedication to the craft and practice of writing. The process was becoming the thing that calmed me, that challenged me, and that forced me through a process of discovery that was far more therapeutic than simply sitting down to think. While there were plenty of pages that I filled with meaningless accounts of my life, I was writing in a way that, as a kid, taught me that what I thought and said had value. I wouldn’t put a price on my childhood journals—they’re far too worthless to anyone else unless I suddenly realize my dream of becoming Shonda Rhimes—but when I think about that writing, I begin to notice how my journals full of observations turned me into a girl whose passion for storytelling was what really became ingrained in her character.
As is evidenced by the years of journaling, I don’t always write for other people; in fact, more often than not, the writing I do is meant for some other innate purpose. For jotting down a character that I think is funny, or a scene from my own life I felt was worth documenting But sometimes, the need to produce a purposeful piece trumps the need to engage in the process without giving much thought to the outcome. I don’t always write for other people, but when I do there is an obvious distinction between the writing I do for others and the kind that only I will ever see. The writing I do for others, or that was meant for others to see, also serves an important purpose in my own life. Writing is how I get what I want, how I convince individuals to help me or to see things my way. The other kind of writing is the kind that, while there is a chance someone might see it, I write it without a particular audience in mind. Maybe that’s wrong—audience is such an important thing to consider in so many contexts, but so much of what ends up in my notebooks or in various drafts on my hard drive was contrived without the notion of what anyone else would think. I wrote what I wanted and didn’t consider the implications of what I had to say. I get a lot of questions on this subject, mainly condensed to one question that asks me why, if I believed no one would ever read it, I would bother writing anything. Fair enough.
I think the real truth is hard to admit because it is so counterintuitive to the process that drives my creativity. My process is defined by the idea that I am writing for myself, which removes any pressure from the thought that anyone else might have something to say about what I write. I suppose that outside of the journals I kept so meticulously, I don’t really ever write without the intention of eventually showing it to someone. It’s more that during the initial stages of each piece, I consciously step outside the possibility of showing my work to others. In this way, at least in my own head, I think I manage to maintain some sense of authenticity in what I say. With this in mind though, I can’t ignore the fairly urgent next step in my journey in order to fully believe in my own writer label—the step that involves knowing your audience and figuring out how to tailor my own voice to suit any number of different audiences.
I still have a long way to go.
Sometimes, I accomplish the most when my process becomes nearly automated. I know what I want to say and the words come spilling out onto the page faster than I can think them. But sometimes after that, I’ll stare at that one page I wrote for an hour. I wonder about each sentence I wrote—was it the truth? Was it maybe too superfluous? Too fake? Will anyone care? Did I really say what I was trying so desperately to say?
And sometimes even now, I’ll just sit in silence and copy my name. I still love writing that loopy cursive I learned back in the first grade. Every time I sit in a quiet room or even in a crowded coffee shop, tracing those letters over and over, I really love just letting my thoughts wander in the absentmindedness. I’m also pretty sure that is the closest I will ever get to meditating, and it’s in those moments that the ideas start to come to me. I know suddenly what it is I want to say and how to say it, and my hands are thrown into a race against the speed of my own thoughts. There’s no better feeling than putting the pencil down at the end of the race. That’s why I write.
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