People oftentimes think that anyone can be a good writer because it’s just words. People might devalue writing and say that you should be doing something better and more lucrative with your time.
It’s staying up until 6 in the morning because you want to get all of your thoughts down before you forget them. It’s tearing your hair out because you’re stuck, and you don’t know how to continue on. It’s rereading your writing and hating the words you’ve written because they sound so stilted and boring.
Writers, what you are doing now is an impressive thing. You’re attempting to create an entire world from scratch, create compelling characters that will capture the hearts of readers, trying to explain that brilliant scene in words when you can visualize it so clearly in your mind.
It can be a really difficult and daunting task, but you’re doing it and you’re doing it well. It’s not worthless, it’s not meaningless, and it has a lot of value.
Writing is the joy of your characters coming to life. It’s the rush that you get when you finally get to that one scene you’ve been dying to write. It’s feeling like you want to cry when someone tells you that they loved what you wrote. It’s that sense of accomplishment you get when you can look back at what you’ve written and say “wow… I actually did this.” It’s the sense of fulfillment you get when you’ve had a productive day. It’s those long days of just thinking about how your story is going to surprise you, and planning ahead 20 novels in advance because you love your writing and your story. It’s the joy of creating, the fruits of your labor, and the excitement of sharing it with other people who will love it just as much as you do.
Nothing will ever take that away from you. Let yourself be proud of being a writer. Give yourself a pat on your back and say “Hey you know what? I love writing, and I’m doing great.” Because you are. You’re doing something really hard, and you’re doing it well.
Writing is an art that can touch people’s hearts, and if that’s not magical I don’t know what is.
you have to be annoying and do everything as passionately and genuinely as possible because we live in a world where everyone operates through sixteen layers of post irony and to love with recklessness is literally counterculture.
hm sometimes i wish i was one of those people who moves thousands of miles away and never looks back and has a ton of adventures unmoored from their past and where they’re from but i can’t help looking back and i’m deeply, fervently defined by every person, thing, or place i’ve ever loved
your twenties are Not about saving money or networking. your twenties are about rinsing your heart in rice water. wearing big jackets. smelling night blooming jasmines. giving up on being sexy and embracing flaw and rot and thus inadvertently becoming sexy. planting cabbages and cauliflowers inside your internal landscape and making a garden in you instead of letting your internal landscape be a stormy sea tossing you around. cartwheeling in spirit if not person when you make a friend. and letting your eyebrows live a little.
“Separated by almost a generation, Akutagawa and Dazai were never associated with one another as members of a school or literary current; nor did they ever come close to creating the master-disciple bond so common in the history of modern Japanese letters. However, Dazai was keenly interested in Akutagawa, especially during those formative years of late adolescence and early manhood; indeed, several of his youthful writings make indirect references to the older writer. Looking at both lives in retrospect, one can detect a number of striking resemblances. Each writer occupied a peculiar and ambiguous position in his family, giving rise to a troubled childhood and adolescence in each case; each entered his maturity deeply alienated from society; and finally, each committed suicide on the threshold of middle age. Not surprisingly, both Akutagawa and Dazai wrote out of desperation and with a degree of moral passion. Both excelled in the short tale, Akutagawa never attempting anything longer than a novelette, and Dazai, except for his two postwar novels, appearing to best advantage in the short tale and the vignette.”
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James O’Brien, from the introduction to Akutagawa and Dazai: Instances of Literary Adaptation
