Lilly

Writing is hard. Some of my classmates act like it’s not. “I can crank out a college essay in 20 minutes,” someone brags to me in the hall.

“I never start my papers until the night before and I still get good grades,” someone else challenges.

By the time we’re seniors in high school, I guess that isn’t too surprising—I’ve done my fair share of both. But that’s a very specific kind of writing, one that we’re basically trained to do, day in and day out, for years. I wonder to myself: When was the last time those classmates sat down and wrote something for themselves? Not for a grade. Not for a deadline. Not for an application.

Say I asked them that question and they didn’t know, couldn’t tell me the answer, I couldn’t blame them. It’s not like we’re given much time, especially at a school like mine where math and science classes get heavy outside attention, and it sometimes feels like our English and social studies teachers are just doing whatever they possibly can to get us thinking outside that box again.

I still make an effort—every once in a while, on a weekend or over a break—to sit down and write something just for me. It doesn’t have to be good, I tell myself. I can erase it from the face of the earth when I’m done if I want. No one else will ever see it.

But I used to write so much. In third grade, my best friends and I started a tiny writing club—only four or five people—at my elementary school; we met once a week after school and spent a happy hour reading excerpts of what we had written over the past seven days aloud to each other. Together, we invented and scrapped hundreds of settings and characters, and gave each other suggestions on where to next take our plotlines. Everyone looked forward to the club every week, hooked on the serial updates, pushing each other to have the next segment of Oracle’s Gateway or Observatory 101 finished by Wednesday. (That was hardly a deadline, though. All too often one of us would come in with something entirely different and everyone’s eight-year-old minds would be wiped clean of the previous endeavor in favor of the new one.)

I still have almost all of those old journals, the first drafts of pieces that won local writing competitions and—more importantly—the undivided attention of my friends every Wednesday.

Sharing my writing used to drive me to finish things, to carry them through, to not disappoint my tiny but crucial audience each week. It wasn’t pressure—it was support. The deadline written at the top of an assignment sheet is pressure. The honest engagement in the trials and tribulations I’d put my characters through—that was support.

Maybe it’s time to stop being so private about everything I write. Call it a New Year’s resolution. ♦