So much writing out there is someone else’s work.

 

Not someone else’s words literally, although I’m sure every sentence that’s been written has been written somewhere else. Someone else’s thoughts to get to a predetermined endpoint, a fixed meaning. Using someone else’s constructions without realizing it. All because they have written a thing and have authority, but you haven't and you don't. So better to trust ideas already formed into words than the intuitions in your head.

 

I’ve learned that that’s a mistake. You have to trust your own ideas about the world for writing to be any good. Especially when inexperienced, new, young and green. Your own observations carry weight. Because writing isn’t a primitive form of telepathy, a transfer of words from your head onto the page. Writing is thinking itself. Putting into sentences what you notice, intuit, and judge. Shaping sentences intentionally is the very process of thought. It’s thinking done in words, paragraphs, and punctuation. It’s the only kind of thinking that matters because thinking isn’t a natural state. Writing has no “inspiration,” no fluttering of keys to record your brilliance before it disappears.

 

Writing is hard. And it should be because thinking is hard.

 

It’s time to unlearn what school has taught me about writing. No more being impressed with myself to the point of pretension, no more performative prose, no more verbalisms and jargon. No more self-indulgence in all the intelligence I have to prove in the piece.

 

Just clarity.

 

And the immense satisfaction of self-expression.