I used to love to write. I’d start novels, write short stories, scribble poems and lyrics in journals. While my friends had hobbies such as dancing and drawing, I wrote. It wasn’t silly or stupid. It was just what I did.
Here I am now, going into ninth grade. While I still love to write, it's not quite the same. Suddenly, everything I write needs to have purpose. Novels need to be the next “great American”. Stories have to be edited five times over until every colon and comma knows its place. Songs need to be number-one-hit material. The soft feel of a pen flowing across a paper hardly exists, replaced by the repetitive sound of fingers on a keyboard. Don’t even dream about cursive, either. That’s gone.
But through this major change in my writing, I’ve learned a very precious lesson: sometimes we just need to sit down and truly write. Not the artificial works on a Microsoft Word document, by the simplistic stylings of pen to paper. Who cares what’s written? When your world goes to pot, it’s important to know that, when all is said and done, the only things that matter are you and those words. No matter the shape of the paper they’re written on, words are eternal.
Moral of the story:
Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
Cyril Connolly
