Why Do Young Writers Write?

The following blog posts explore how and why these young writers exercise their craft. Enjoy.

Because Their World is Flat by Stephanie Thompson

In their stories, the world is a flat, beautifully shaped two-dimensional object. The oceans, the people, the mountains, the valleys are all flat. I imagine it’s a wonderful thing to be flat, to feel the earth beneath you and see the horizon above you and know, indubitably, that this paper-thin world is yours and it was made for you. I bet they love knowing that.

Their stories have no body but my body, and no voice but my voice, and sometimes I relish in them. I pull out a pen, or up a chair, and let the voices have their way. I feel them rush through my nervous system and take possession of my body as they suddenly become stronger than me, and I, the true inhabitant of my body, take a backseat as they tell their stories.

When I write I become a type of deity in my own right. I create beings and worlds that wouldn’t exist without me. But I don’t leave them as words, no, I give them life. I blow life into them with my own breath until they have another dimension. Only then, after I have put a part of me into the words, do they truly become three-dimensional.

The time I don’t write, I take their stories and crush them. I ball them up or rip them apart. I backspace until there is nothing but a blank page left. Sometimes I hide the stories and just let stuff pile up onto them. When I don’t write, the voices devour because I starve them. When I refuse to let them bathe in the sunlight of revision or refuse to let them even come into being, they collide against each other in my mind and bounce freely and evilly on my neurological pathways. There is only so much room in my mind, and currently there are no vacancies.

If I don’t write, if no one wrote, we’d be back in the past. There would be no spreading of ideas, or knowledge, or beliefs. There would only be what one was told. If no one wrote, the world would be a paper-thin two-dimensional object; it would lose what makes it, and us, three-dimensional. It would lose its life.

Writing creates life. I write because someone else may not, and because the voices sometimes kick me to the brink of insanity. It would be a waste not to write because I can create other worlds on a piece of paper, and give those people hopes, failures, flaws, aspirations, and love with my pen. I write because their world is flat (for now,) but I, with the power of my writing, can change that because their world, once given life, is my world, too. And it is beautiful.

Imagined Memory by Emma Symmonds

I’m a victim of severe childhood trauma.  I have no father, not even a wisp of a male authority figure. I was raised in a house with two physically disabled and one mentally disabled person; I witnessed the slow degeneration of a girl succumbed to cancer. I saw it eat at her skin.

Not literally, though; writing attacks me with images of her rotted face, certainly ground to dust after ten years, even if I never saw it, and that speaks of illness, doesn’t it? That’s why I write, make words into leeches to suck on poisoned veins, to compensate for love lost in childhood and to lament overdramatically on the years of opportunity passing me by. All writers are sick, surely.

If it can’t be diagnosed, maybe I’m lonely. Maybe writing doesn’t attack like a beast in the night, maybe it quivers in the forest like a bobcat shot in the leg, just waiting. It’s waiting to be eaten or carried off, and it recognizes its lonesomeness in me and extends a paw. Maybe I’m the bobcat.

That’s not it, we’re not in a forest, and I don’t write for loneliness. I read for it. When I begin a new story I expect to experience those characters and live vicariously through them, and I love it, it’s exhilarating. I can hear their words rattling me even now, and I can feel their emotions. I can cry freely, for the sake of another, even if that person who’s died never even lived in the first place.

For the people who have lived…I want to make someone cry harder over my characters than they did for their own dead grandparents.

There is a certain satisfaction found in emotional sadism that speaks to me, and it remains the most beautiful thing about writing. I want to slip behind one-way glass and watch my reader tear out his hair and teeth to stem the emotional agony. I want to see him flip through the pages and throw the booklet on the floor, and I want a temper tantrum. I want a revolt, I want broken glass. I want my writing to affect people as other stories affect me.

Beyond emotion, there is always the realm of money and prestige, and I want that as much as I want readers’ tears. I’m ambitious. This whole gamble, this thing I’ve dedicated five years of my life to, education in the art of metaphorically tearing people to shreds, I want that to pay off.

It’s already begun. There have been small victories in school competitions, publications, a national contest or two. It’s just got to get bigger, and I can do that, and I want to do that, so I’ll write for greed. And greed will write for me.

 Similar to loneliness, there is distraction. The genuine need to reside within something intangible, an idea of a love story or string of beautiful nonsensical words, rests in me. It burrows within my core and rustles its feathers now and again, and the tickle of soft down on my esophagus reminds me the real world isn’t enough. Experiencing, living, it’s not enough if I can’t fake-smell that fake-grass pressing into the fake-cheek of that fake-boy as he gets fake-beaten into the fake-ground.

This here, this is the real thing. All this satire amounts to nothing without the truth: I’m not sick, I’m not too lonely but I am alone, I’m a sadist, I’m ambitious, and I write. There’s got to be something more, and I’m too lazy to get up and find it. So, I create it.

A Purpose by Jessica Prescott

When I was five, things had no purpose.  You couldn’t ask me the motives behind my crudely stapled sheets of computer paper and crayon-smeared scribbles, I’d just thrust the booklet in your hands and demand for you to read it.  My world started in those ten scrawled pages, featuring umbrellas, helicopters, and doodles of characters with arms protruding from their ears.  But there was no purpose. Not yet.

The years were pages, turning to reveal another chapter of train wreck first grade handwriting, another unfinished novel composed of cliché second grade archetypes and incomplete plotlines that contained every random detail except logic. In third grade, my drive was arrogance. In fifth, it was to impress my peers.  And by eighth grade, when I finally completed my first full novel, it was a sense of accomplishment. My eyes gleamed with the images of my hardback copies on the shelf, the words of the voice actors to the future movie adaptation ringing in my ears.  I would lay awake at night planning sequels, television deals, feature film franchises… Maybe my drive was fame, or maybe it was to be heard. A motive, sure. But was it a purpose? Not yet.

I took the sea of compliments I’d received before as a given.  Before Douglas Anderson, there wasn’t much to compare to.  Some of my friends were talented writers, others were more geared to another art, but I was always credited as the good writer of the class.  I may not have won every competition, but being suggested as a writer, reader, or speaker was the best feeling in the world.  I was good at something — successful, for once.

My purpose materialized in ninth grade.  Transitioning from a close-knit crew of sixteen ragtag middle schoolers to a near-exploding ocean of talented writers was quite the culture shock.  Here, every teacher wouldn’t know my name, every student wouldn’t be my best friend, and every creative writer was here with their own purpose.

It was then something changed.

I realized how sheltered I’d been, unintentionally kept oblivious to the overwhelming talent around me.  The first day of school, I read a piece of writing soaring above anything I’d ever produced.  Day after day I went through the same process, each piece I read better than the last.  All the compliments I’d received in the past immediately flew into the files in my brain marked “lies”.  I questioned how I even got into this school, and why I was even deemed worthy to work in the same room as these astonishing writers.

Over the past two years, not just in writing, my whole view of myself has deteriorated.  Karma has come back to bite me for my arrogance — it’s now that I begin to realize just how I really was in other people’s eyes.  I feel I’m unable to burst from the shell of the gloating little fourth grader shoving tattered binders down people’s throats, the obnoxious little middle schooler ripping compliments out of exasperated classmates and teachers.  But once I realized that the compliments were only brought on to spare my feelings, everything took a drastic turn.  And I found my purpose.

I write to escape from my own life. Writing is the only way to become another — to construct the people I wish I could be, the people who everybody else wishes I could be, and become them, just for a short time. My only purpose is to remove myself from myself, to assume the identity — the only one that really keeps me sane — for as long as I can.

I cannot imagine a greater feeling than knowing I can immerse myself into another person — a better person — if only for an hour or two. However, when I put down the pen or shut the laptop, it’s then I realize I’m just Jessica. To everyone around me, I’m just Jessica.

So once again, I pick up the pen and wistfully put it to paper.

Write from Memory by Cody Williams

I write because of the unseen detail on the back of a stranger’s head on an abandoned street, for the experiences from the little blue house or the dreary fog surrounding an apartment where baby without mother resides.  The demons that possess me when I know more than I should: the embracing envelope of night when tears and dimples no longer have definite meaning and the sponge so overwhelmed with yesterday’s flood of bad memory and forgotten detail drains out.

I write to speak when my mouth is hinged shut, and those around me are deaf to the informative: to fill my wordless gestures with loud expression. Amidst the reality around me, I seek to create a reality of my own, take the zeitgeist of dreams, and organize them into the killers that never experienced a parent’s touch or a whimsical girl entombed in the delusion that she rules a distant kingdom when she truly lives in the back alley of a small city and has a disturbed cognizance.

I compose the screeching melodies within me when the sound is too much, and my sanity can no longer be classified: when I no longer have excuses for writing that extra word on a blank sheet and cramming it somewhere at the bottom of a folder.  My mind knows not what it imagines, only what it can pull from the events that surround me; it yearns to take the unexplainable happenings of why I was deserted in the cold mildewed apartment of a reputable prostitute and pimp and transforms it into an imaginable plot.

I write to ask, “What would he or she say in this situation?” “What would it say in this situation?”  And scribble the scrabble on my opus to watch it take form and grow until it can no longer fit the space and ventures off the page.

I write because someone can’t approach their mother’s grave, because a mother’s child is vengeful for the untold secrets of his life, because no one knows why the boy suddenly jumped from his bedroom window in the middle of the night.  I record the menacing faces around me, the silence I hear when people converse and the doors of a school bus imitate gas rushing from a tube: the way the moon’s rays pierce through my frosty window and create a humanoid outline with the blinds on my wall.

I write to give myself authority when it was taken away by my abandonment, and I was thrown to every foster home that drew my strings and commanded me to lose every story that I had kept secret.

When I have no other power, when my speech doesn’t matter, when my mind can no longer reason, when I am skulking with insane revelations that reach over the boundary of logical thinking, when we no longer heed to the hidden details around us, I write.

Bookworms by Gabrielle Smith

I first began writing because I was a large bookworm.

Books give the feeling of a caveman walking into Narnia. From what I’ve experienced, books are the only things that cradle this secret power which allows me to walk through a portal into a new world. It is like an addictive drug that draws me back for more to get that feeling one more time.

One day I realized I could brew up potion of my own. However, I didn’t realize that once I made it, I was the only one who could truly feel its effects because it was custom-made for me. When I showed it to others, I was merely complimented on my writing style and how nice it was compared to an average concoction. This is mainly because of all of the books I’ve been reading and the flavors I’ve adopted.

After I wrote more and read more, I noticed that I could summon portals to different worlds along with these potions of emotion. These emotions were very personal so they were all very important to me. Still, no one would feel exactly what I felt and I knew that. I just wished someday I would find someone who walked through a portal and saw the same wonderlands I see when I write. I never did.

Lately, I’ve learned that there are different genres and techniques to provoke a certain flavor or taste in the people who read what I wrote. For a while, I only wrote for myself and I was okay with that. Now I have the ability to send the exact image and hair-raising excitement that I had only injected into just myself for so long. It is amazing to know that I have the ability to cook up a potion made with my own body, and with time and revision, I can have it approved to be given to people from beyond my jurisdiction and touch people who I will probably never meet.

It is better this way, because I am not a people person and meeting new people gives me the chills. It brings much joy to know that I can develop an indirect friendship with people I don’t have to go through the trouble of meeting. It is more based on a spiritual connection than a physical one and I can connect with anyone to the deepest of marrow to reveal that secret wonderland I have visited so often.

I often have magical experiences that appear absolutely unreal, but I can’t tell anyone about them because the meaning gets lost in the voice. I am a terrible storyteller and I realized myself how boring everything that I say is. I prefer to keep it on paper and possibly even learn to recite it out loud without hurting its high status. As for now, I will keep my voice inside while figuring out how to control the time warp they go through so they can be in my world instead of a general planet.

When I finish school, I don’t want to be like the stereotypical struggling writer that is nearly homeless trying to live off of wrinkled pieces of paper. I don’t want to be the old woman who sits in her chair recalling all of the things she used to be able to do. Good memories are pleasant for an evening reminiscence, but they feel much better being experienced. I want to be able to prove my talents and make a decent living off of it if the time ever comes. I’ve been told that one needs a crutch to fall back on when their career choice doesn’t work out, so I chose writing, something I would be doing in my spare time anyway.

At the moment, it seems as though this is not the best kind of crutch to want to fall back on, but this is what I want and I want to improve my abilities enough to be able to lean back without cracking my support. When I retire, I will have a supply of potions I will be working on along with the memorable portals of the past.

Child-Writer by Alex Kaplan

My mom used to be an English professor. She was always a big reader, and a serious writer, and the one who first introduced me to poetry. She bought me books as presents. Short of teaching me the alphabet, she did most of the work of getting me to become a writer. When I wrote stories, she’d read through them, and give honest, age-appropriate criticisms. When the writing got to a point at which it began to show talent, she was the one who got me to show it off.

Whenever my mom had friends over (and they were usually writer friends from work,) she persuaded me to read some poems for them. I’d always get applause and praise. I was told I was a good poet, even as a seven-year-old. Whether this was because I was actually a good poet, or just because I was a cute seven-year-old trying, I never actually knew. Regardless, I kept writing, becoming usually one of the best in my class, in all classes.

The thing is, when you’re told from a young age you’re a good poet, and encouraged to read your work, you learn from a young age to not write for yourself. I wrote poetry to impress people, I wrote stories to impress my mom, I wrote for a real newspaper to impress my teachers, and I generally got no satisfaction from any of it. I didn’t enjoy writing, but it was bearable, as long as I got appreciation for it from others.

This isn’t really a horrible, cataclysmic way to introduce someone to writing, and I don’t think it was a mistake on my mom’s part, because it helped me as much as it held me back, but it’s made me grow up writing solely to have something I’m proud of. I didn’t ever really enjoy writing, I only enjoyed having written something that impressed adults. It wasn’t until late in middle school or early in high school that I started enjoying the writing as much as the final product. The thing that changed it, was discovering my humor.

When I discovered I could write things how I wanted instead of how they were expected to be written, several things changed. I started taking the writing less seriously and having more fun with it, and I started to enjoy taking an answer to a prompt and trying to write it out exactly as how I’d say it.

It became enjoyable to write, because instead of trying to make myself write what people expected, I could say whatever I wanted to say in a much more organized and thought out way than speech, and have people be obliged to hear me out (much to some of my teacher’s dismay.) I had more freedom, and more self-expression, even though I still retain the enormous sense of accomplishment at having written something well polished, after it’s finished.

Lost Civilizations by Rey Mullennix

I write to keep the demons away, to keep the snapping jaws at bay from the innards of my thoughts, being fueled by my imagination. I write to open this floodgate of raw energy and ideas and let it flow from my brain, transforming my thoughts into the ink that stains my paper and builds the worlds of long-lost civilizations, overgrown with disrepair.

To try to help others who may be suffering from real or imagined ailments, or to cure them from the boredom that creeps in on us all.

Sometimes I want to write. But when the times get rough and my heart starts pounding, with mental images soaring before my shifting eyes, I have to. I have to let go and hold on, hoping to have enough strength to harness the beast of talent and tame it to production.

I used to write to sometimes feel the pain from this evil creature that once lived in the back of my head that would prod at my insecurities and takes cheap shots at my simple mistakes. But, I feel it has gone away to take up shop elsewhere, tormenting some other, unlucky soul.

To write is to grab, take, borrow from my past experiences, to reach into the boiling cauldron of my pent-up emotions, and toss them into my amalgamation of writing. It’s to shape those misfortunate events of my past into something that the reader can feel and experience, taking a first-hand experience and transforming it from a memory into stagnant, black and white words.

With those words, I feel that I am making God smile. Taking the good from the bad in His shaped world and turning it away from its original nature. I will still hate some of my pieces, the words I chose and the way I put them together. But I can’t stop writing. To write means that I continue to fight, to continue to wage war against those barriers that place themselves before my path and destroy them with my words.

My writing isn’t reserved as a white thing, a black thing, a teenage thing, or a boy thing. It’s the release of a living, breathing idea, freeing it into the world it wants to be captured in. I write to try to understand my own thought processes and try to see what theme is constant.

Even if my time never comes, even if my writing isn’t a New York Time’s best-seller, and I don’t end up on an episode of Oprah: The Next Chapter, I will know that I do what is required of me and what I enjoy. I’d rather be a happy failure than a miserable success. What is the use of becoming rich and famous if I lose my happiness?

I write, because even when I tell myself otherwise, I don’t feel like a failure. I can see the sharpening of the light in my family’s eyes as I read my work. I feel like an individual whose thoughts and opinions are worthwhile. I don’t like the idea of becoming just another brick in the wall.

Have a Piece of Cheese by Kat Roland

I could write for everyone else. My words could be their smooth milk chocolate rolling on their tongue until the chocolate melts and their fingers reach for the red fringe trim for more from the heart-shaped box on Valentine’s Day. My words could be their sharp butcher’s knife when all they had before was a butter knife. My words could be cannons blasting into the crevices of their eyelids. 

If I don’t write for me, for myself, then what I’m doing is not writing. It is business. I can take that leather briefcase and haul it with the swing of my shoulder into the dirtiest river with a splash. Business is not of my concern. Business is a form of pollution and it will feed the fees of the roof over my head, it will create the most toxic outpourings of leaks and drips from the damp circle on the ceiling. I cannot see the ceiling of the living room, because all of it is under the layer of my skin. My living room is filled with pumping blood and intestines and tubes with air running into bowls of liquid. 

When the door to my living room scoots open to let some unknown thoughts in, I say: “Thoughts, go sit down on the sofa, enjoy yourselves to the plate of cheese and crackers on the table.”

Conversations from these strange, alien thoughts can lead to any type of visit. For all I know, their hovercrafts or scooters could be in two chunky pieces of metal. If this is the case, I let the guests stay with me for a while. When the guests mess with the emotional side of me, then I know it’s time for them to get out of my house. Regardless of if their transportation hovercrafts are fixed. Then I slowly turn the metal piece on the door and it locks. I retreat to the living room. 

From this point, I bring out the hammers and screw drivers from out of the yellow tool box hidden under the couch. I smash the glass in picture frames. I pull the stuffing out of the pillows until I’m sitting in glass and unshapely pieces of cloth pillow skeletons. 

I sit there. I sit there until my thumbs and other fingers have band aids from cuts curled around them. I sit there until the pillows are pillows again and the glass is back together. Don’t call me crazy for having glued back together glass pieces. Sure, it’s atrocious and makes the picture in the frame more difficult to decipher. But this is how my living room works.

The repair process of my living room is my writing process. The repaired living room after this ruin and fix time is a new clean piece of paper, waiting for guests to come and sit on the lines, because the couches are on the lines. The entire sheet of paper is the rug in my living room, perhaps I forgot to mention that before. 

This is why I don’t write for anyone else. I write for me because anyone else is just a guest. And I say to them, go sit on the couch. Have a piece of cheese.

Juggling Pens by Brooke Azzaro

As much as I am a writer, I am a juggler. I spend five days of the week rolling through life on my unicycle. Unbalanced and unwieldy, I struggle to balance beneath the balls I juggle. As the week goes on, the balls become larger. Soon, I am frantic, and I struggle to withstand the weight of the world that I hold in my small hands. Then, I crumble; tumbling from my unicycle onto the cold hard ground. A slap in the face. Writing, I find, is sometimes the only thing that gets me back on my feet again.

Tough situations are something that everyone holds as a burden. Over the years as a student and a human being I have learned to struggle through a lot of them. I know that vulnerability leaves me feeling bare, and bawling. I know how anxious stings the pit of my stomach. I also know how defeat tastes in my mouth; like a usurping salt. As a writer, I have learned that it is best to dwell within these things for a little while. The dwelling not only helps me to solve all my problems, but then allows me to be inspired from them. Words then flow to me and my sentences come onto paper like spoken prose.

And obstacles throw themselves in my path. And they grow like dry weeds and crawl through the cracks of my yellow brick road to become large, towering vines. In order to get through the forest, I have learned that I have to know what I am capable of and relish my talent. Once I have done that, I am able to slay the vines that stand in my way, and become something bigger than myself.

I also know that when I put a pen to paper, I can escape through self-expression. I’m not troubled, or full of angst and hatred – but I, like all of us, have something to run from. The rigid textbooks that are causing my back to ache, and the workload that stains me with sleepy purple eyes; I am chained down by the obligation to be perfectionism itself. Then, I can run with my writing and be free of the vines and the chains and the burdens. It’s only when I have used every drop of my talent and energy that I get through it all.

When I began to understand that I can solve my problems with writing, I was free. When I began to understand that I am not alone when I struggle, I grew as a writer. Because I know that I am not alone, I am less afraid. I am more compelled to write something because now, I am not only writing for myself, but for everyone or anyone that feels what I feel. I write for myself, the juggler, just as much as I do for the other jugglers that struggle with me.