I have been writing since I was around thirteen or fourteen. At that time it was poems, or short stories about my friends. Nothing impressive enough to show anyone.
The reason why I starting writing was mostly emotions I couldn’t cope with.
My mom got into a bad accident by a drunken driver. All these emotions were running haywire inside of me, and the only way I could process them was on paper. It was the first time in life that writing had helped me. It soothed my aching heart, and by the time I was finished with something I felt better. It was as if what I felt inside moved onto the paper, stayed there unburdening me until I was almost free.
One day, I was at my great uncles house showing him a scrapbook I made. My great uncle ran across my poems as he flipped through it at the bar in his basement. He grabbed the first one I had ever wrote and then looked at his small fourteen year old great niece in almost a shock.
This is what my much younger self wrote:
What do you do when all hope is gone?
What do you do when things come undone?
What do you do when life feels unbearable?
What do you do when everything is terrible?
What do you do when your only escape is sleep?
What do you do when feelings run more then skin deep?
What do you do when no one notices good deeds?
What do you do when no one hears your pleas?
What do you do when you just feel cursed?
What do you do when things get worse?
What do you do when you think of suicide?
What do you do when you always hurt inside?
I guess the only thing to do is to give up, or suck it up. Believe that sooner or later things get better.
“This is how you feel? Why didn’t you talk to anyone about it?” He asked.
I got embarrassed when he asked if this is how I really felt. I shrugged nand asked him not to tell anyone about my poems. I didn’t want anyone to make fun of me. He never did, because no one ever knew that I liked to write.
My point in all that is that writing, for me, became a comfort. It was what got me through things, and I didn’t want people to see who I really was. Poems that have such raw emotions, no matter how good or bad they are, can make a person see right into your soul.
After I went from poems to stories I remained private. I may not have been exposing my soul as much, but I was afraid someone could take my writing away. If I was told it wasn’t good then I wouldn’t be a writer. After all, a writer who sucks at writing isn’t really a writer. I was wrong.
Writing isn’t about how good you are at it, or what others think. It isn’t about how many books you write, or how much money you make. Being a writer isn’t even about being published or unpublished (though it is a big part of it).
It’s about a story inside of you that needs to be written. Without you to write it then it would never be told. Those characters, their story, and screams for life would disappear forever.
If I never get published, and not a single person reads my work I will still be happy. The reason is because I still wrote it, and I am still a writer. I still got the comfort from the pages, and I still felt the emotions of my words. Nothing else really matters.
It is only now that I have finally realized no one can take it away, that I began to look into publication. Anyone who knows the life of query letters, publishers, and literary agents knows it’s hard to get published without previously published work.
I bought The Writers Market, and it gave me some really good tips. A blog and social media presence is important to get work noticed. The idea frightened me, and still does a little, but I made this blog and my page anyway.
Even now as I share what I write, and my heart beats wild with every new view I am still happy being hidden. I still don’t like to admit I’m a writer, and to be honest, most of my family still doesn’t know.
Why do people still not know I’m a writer?
My work should speak for itself. The world will find out eventually i'm sure of that, but let them find out from something that I write. Let them read the words, and know the meaning. Let them see my writing instead of me.
