I rip the wide ruled pages from my pink floral composition book, the loose sheets fluttering to the floor. My hands shake as I ball up dozens of pages full of my own handwriting and tearfully mash them into the bottom of the trashcan. I stand there for a moment and let the realization wash over me—I’m twelve years old and my writing career is over.
Thankfully, my melodramatic past self was wrong.
At the time, I was thirty pages into my very first story (a fantasy tale called, oddly, Nowhere) and had just been struck with my first bout of writer’s block. The feeling was like nothing I had experienced before. The story I had been falling in love with suddenly turned against me. The words no longer flowed from my pencil, and the abyss of the white and blue lined page overwhelmed me.
This, in my twelve-year-old mind, meant that I was a failure as a writer.
Eventually, the urge to write the stories that existed in my head was too much to ignore, and I returned to the pages of a new notebook. However, the monster of my past still lurked there, telling me I was a failure if I struggled.
For the longest time, I assumed the writers I loved—Whitman, Morrison, Clearly, Rowling—didn’t have to try when they sat down in front of their keyboard or desk. Instead of fighting each word into place like I did, theirs poured from their fingertips as freely as iced tea on a hot Southern day. That notion, which I’ve come to realize many young writers believe, is an ugly lie.
Writing is the struggle.
It is pushing beyond where you think you can stretch your imagination no further. It is reaching into the past and giving a voice to people who would otherwise be lost to time and distance. It is the miraculous ability to capture a feeling just beyond words, naming what is nameless. It is weaving our own threads into the tapestry that tells the story of what it means to be human. To write is to struggle with unanswerable questions not for the sake of answering them but for the other questions you will inevitably raise in the process.
I find it ironic that the story I wrote years ago was titled Nowhere because that is where every writer begins. We begin nowhere with vast nothingness before us, no tools other than the pen and paper and blinking cursors. It is where we choose to go from there that is extraordinary.
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Makenna Myers is from San Diego, California. She has a passion for words— reading, writing, and editing them. You can find her at her happiest with a pen in her hand and a blank page before her. Appropriately, she is a junior majoring in humanities with an emphasis in creative writing and a minor in English. Outside of her love for creative writing, she has experience writing CMS and MLA formats and has written for professors such as Danger, Armstrong, and Elliott (among many others). She cannot wait to see you in the studio; keep conquering that blank page!