Lilly

When I was in elementary school, all I really cared about was books—books I was reading and books I was writing. I saw the world through the filter of how I could write about it: how to describe a scene, how to relay everything I saw, sensed, and felt to someone reading my words. I definitely appreciated visual art and still do, but I have always struggled to express myself with pencils or paint. Words come easier to me.

If I were to go back and read the stuff I was writing back then, I’m sure I would wince at my tortured metaphors and pretentious turns of phrase. But back then I wasn’t afraid of my writing; in fact, I was eager to share it. My friends and I started a small writing club, and I looked forward to our after-school meetings, where we took turns reading our stuff out loud, assuming ridiculous voices for different characters and steadfastly refusing to describe our kissing scenes. (We were third-graders. I’m surprised any of us wrote about kissing at all.)

After a year of weekly writing club meetings, I decided to enter my elementary school’s writing competition. Each year, five winners were selected and got to skip a day of school for our school district’s young authors’ conference, where they could take part in writing workshops and meet young-adult authors. One of the five would then get a chance to attend the state conference in a city two hours away.

I sent in a fantasy piece about a book with dragons sleeping inside it and a girl who wakes them up. It was short and full of the elaborate descriptions and ornate imagery that were my hallmark as a writer. I won the school competition, then the district-wide one, and then I was sent off to the state conference, cheered on by the other members of the writing club.

The next year, I wrote a story about a boy who is a distant descendant of a race of mythical beings and who discovers that he is next in line for their throne. I won again. It felt good to be acknowledged for the thing I loved to do.

I stopped writing early in middle school, and I’m not entirely sure why. I still read almost as much as I used to, but the words that used to fill so many notebooks have stopped flowing from my brain. Maybe it’s because I’ve been too busy trying to juggle being a soccer jock and a queer lady and a math nerd to maintain another interest, but you’d think those things would feed my writing, not hinder it!

I’m going to write more. I’m choosing a busy time of year to start, but I know I can make the time for it. Whether it’s diary entries like I write here, creative snippets, finally cranking out some pieces of the novel I’ve had in my head for years…I don’t care. I miss writing. This can be a fresh start. ♦