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Writing
Your Creative Process Evolves When You Do
Growth is a creative process — but don’t discount the wisdom of your younger self
When I first began writing online over a decade ago, I wasn’t just building the foundations for my eventual career — I was awakening to the notion that I had a voice. And it was an intoxicating discovery: I had no shortage of things to say, and I lacked the neuroticism and experience that would otherwise have me hesitate to say them. That would come later. In the meantime, I became prolific: giving form to hundreds of thoughts, ideas, and questions that’d been piling up in my brain for a lifetime. I told stories I’d never spoken aloud; I experimented with structure and voice; I wrote from the gut, the heart. Occasionally, I even wrote from the head.
I don’t know how much of that work holds up, 12 years on (by my Virgo standards, I estimate about 2%). At my most prolific, I was publishing two or three stories a day. Now, I chip away at the same essay for months on end before I even know what it’s about. My perspectives seem to evolve at a quicker clip than my ability (or desire) to pin them down, to memorialize them before they slip through my fingers and become something else. And while part of me is content to be less guns-blazing sure about what I think to be true — humility and uncertainty have been some of my best teachers — I do miss the courage I had in those early days, to just spit it out and let it be. Perhaps writing prolifically was its own form of humility — a willingness to not get it perfectly right most times, and an openness to try again tomorrow, either way.
For a long time, I took my diminishing output as a sign that I’d lost something fundamental to my identity as a writer: a skill, a mindset, maybe a passion. Whatever it was that allowed me to churn out words without second-, third-, and fourth-guessing them — it was gone.
The problem — as is often the case — was my perspective: I was viewing the productivity of my younger self as an indictment of my current self, when I could’ve been honoring her, keeping alive the best parts of her experience.
