There is nothing as frustrating on this earth as having a clever idea in your mind but being unable to fully express it through words. Words are hard. They can suck. Sometimes, you want to describe something and there just isn’t the right word for the exact emotion or feeling you’re trying to convey.

Did I mention that words suck?

I made my peace with writing a long time ago. I’ve always viewed writing as a kind of putty that you try and shape into submission. After enough knocks and molding and tinkering, at the end, you might be lucky enough to have a misshapen mass of… something.

That something is story. And that’s why I write. I’m not so fond of the stitching words together part as I am the create new worlds part. Stories have lived in my heart and soul forever, just dying for someone to PLEASE oh God someone ask me about my idea already. 

My life has been shaped by these stories, and I still remember some of the ones I came up with as a child. No, they were not good. But that’s okay! Because at least I wrote them down. And by writing them, I come one step closer to being able to tell the next one.

Something that has become more apparent to me as I progress in my writing career is that writing and storytelling are deeply personal things. When you tell a story, you’re opening yourself up to the world. To write, you must rip away all sense of self-preservation and bleed on the page for everyone to see. No matter what faraway worlds you create as a writer, a part of you lives in that world, and therefore a part of you lives in that story.

And yet, nothing could stop me from wanting to continue to write, to create, to keep punching the putty into something glorious, not even the potential for humiliation. To be able to use something as mundane as words to build an empire that only lives and thrives in my head is the closest thing to performing actual magic. To create stories, we must use words. Words will breathe life into the empires, characters, and creatures who live in our imagination. Words can strike fear or spark hope or evoke kindness.

Writing is one of the hardest things to do, even if it’s one of the earliest skills we learn when we start school. There’s objectively good writing, just as there is objectively bad writing. There are good stories, and then there are mediocre ones. But just like a muscle, writing can be improved, and storytelling skills can be developed. Ultimately, I think it comes down to writers and storytellers being a special breed of creative beings, who need to expulse the stories from their bodies in order to survive. Keeping it locked inside for too long will fester and boil up to the surface eventually. Better to just excise it, get it on a page, and be done with it.

As for me, I write because I have something to say, and I’ve chosen words as my medium.