Person on the Page

Writing is hard work. Maintaining a regular writing practice can be thankless. You don’t always get the recognition and support that you deserve. Your writing gets rejected. Or ignored. You may question your ability. You may wonder why you keep doing it, or if you should.

At times when you feel that your writing is under-appreciated by readers, remember that there are good reasons to keep writing anyway.    

1. You were born to write. 

Maybe since kindergarten or first grade, when you first learned to scrawl letters and words with a fat pencil on primary lined paper, you have known that you were meant to write.  I know I have.  Maybe while other students in elementary school were caught up in the raptures of addition and multiplication tables, you mused about the wordplay in Laura Elizabeth Richards’s poem “Eletelophony” that the teacher read to the class before lunch. Maybe you thought then how exciting it would be to write poems of your own.

Maybe at some point in your life, you knew that writing is what you were born to do. So, no amount of discouragement, rejection, or whatever you view as a lack of success, should ever stop you.

2.  Writing makes you a better person.

Perhaps you have discovered that, like reading, writing makes you more empathetic. You’ve learned that writing about yourself, for instance, allows you to be more understanding of others. Writing about conflicts you have with others or abuses you have endured at the hands of a parent or relative, a partner or employer, helps you make sense of another’s actions or at least to come terms with them.

Perhaps writing about your mean old Aunt Hazel (or whatever your mean old aunt’s name may be)—her racism, her delusions of grandeur, her willingness to sacrifice the welfare of her family members for her own interests—helps you comprehend the extended family dynamic that led to what you see as her narcissistic behavior. Perhaps it leads you to feel compassion for her. Perhaps it helps you to understand yourself.

3.  Through writing, you create retrospect.

When you write about your past experiences, you make yourself two people. Through memory, you see yourself in the past—and that’s you there in the past—immersed in the experience. You watch—and the watcher is also you—at a temporal distance. You, the self of the present, look on the past through the lens of continued experience and greater insight. You are the observer and the observed.  When you write from the perspectives of both past and present selves, you reap the benefits of retrospect. That retrospective vantage point enables you to gain wisdom. 

4.  Writing helps you to know yourself.

You have an unconscious. Like an upheaved sea, it’s roiling with desires, impulses, fears, and hurts of which you are largely unaware. Until you begin to write. Writing invites your unconscious to telegraph messages to you. As you connect words into sentences into texts, your conscious mind drives the mechanics of writing while your unconscious asserts itself onto the page to make itself known.  When you write, you discover what you don’t know, consciously, about yourself.

5.  For you, mere living is not enough. You must give expression to life.  

You hold a kinship with those, from Socrates to Sylvia Plath, who must examine their lives.  The onrush of experience demands exploration. Events become memories. You scan your memories, you parse them. You transform them into language. You write to acknowledge the significance of the daily, the momentary. You write to seize hold of what Mary Oliver calls “your one wild and precious life.” You write to express your awe.

Just keep writing. When you feel that your work is not reaching readers, or that the value of your message goes unrecognized, don’t let disappointment slow your effort. You have many reasons to write.

When you feel discouraged, write anyway.