We all need to write more.
From something as silly as a diary with a fuzzy teddy bear on it when I was 8, to my moody teenage scratchings of poetry in the margins of my notebooks, to my endless writing at the newspaper, writing has been my lifeline.
And I urge it to be yours.
Whether you are on the pre-med track and need to practice your patented, illegible scribbles, an English major writing a 90-page paper on the comparisons between Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and your first grade math teacher, or even a business school student writing a plan to make a small town a real life game of Monopoly — we all write.
So, more accurately, I’m encouraging you to write for fun. I’m urging you to write creatively. I’m urging you to not write for a grade but to sit down, fingers to keyboard or pen to paper.
Sure — this is slight newspaper propaganda. I would love for you to write a tact album review or write an investigative piece about the person under the Demon Deacon mask. We need more writers to cover our community in truthful, objective and accurate reporting, and building our staff is a goal we work on every day. But in all honesty, don’t write just because you want someone to see it. Don’t write singularly for publication, or a grade. Write for yourself. Do not worry about grammar, or how well you string your words together. In the words of the ever-wise, ever-poignant Mary Oliver, “you do not have to be good.”
Writing has a sneaky way of helping us figure out our inner selves. You can unscramble your inner dialogue, figure out your inner turmoils, or less dramatically, just let your creativity pour out onto the page. But don’t tone down the waterworks — I encourage you to write all of your emotions, without inhibitions.
Is this sentiment cheesy? Maybe. But as my first semester as the editor-in-chief comes to a close, I find myself growing more and more nostalgic, already missing something that hasn’t even ended yet. So yes, my diary will stay chock-full of sentimental scribblings, and I hope yours will too.
Maya Angelou said it best — “I make writing as much a part of my life as I do eating or listening to music.”