Whoops!

I did something stupid.  I mean really, really stupid.  You see I just had to go and write a post that was apparently pretty good.  It got posted on Facebook.  And re-posted, and shared and shared again, and people I didn't even know were reading it and commenting on it.  Someone even said they wished someone had shared that letter with them when they were younger.  Overnight, it seemed, I had five times as many people looking at that one post as I had looking at any other post.

The problem is, now I can't write.  It seems I have nothing to say.  Suddenly the pressure is there to improve upon my work, even if the pressure is only coming from myself.  But I can't, not right now at least.  It must have been a moment of inspiration that led me to speak to a girl I don't even know and who will probably never know I even thought of her.  I can't fabricate inspiration. I'm not that good.

I write for fun.  Most of my life I've been writing for myself.  I have journals and journals full of pointless ramblings because I didn't have anything to say but wanted to say it anyways.  I have short stories and dialogues and a few poems as well.  I have stories in my head that could one day become a novel if I could just figure out what happens in the end.  Or in the middle.  Or the beginning.

Most of the stuff I wrote in order to impress people was pretty awful, I always thought.  Or boring at least.  Essays with five sentence paragraphs that begin and conclude thoughts nicely and neatly with just the facts and nothing more always were boring to me.  To read and to write.  The first time I ever had a teacher praise my work, and I mean really praise it, was when I was a senior in high school and I stopped caring about grades and simply sat at a computer and wrote what was on my mind. I don't think my teacher knew I was sarcastic until that moment and she loved it.  From that moment on, I stopped trying to follow structure.  I wrote for myself, and what I wanted to write about, with the occasional Greek paper as a partial exception. (I always seemed to find something I was interested in to insert into the paper.)

But for some reason I decided to write where others could see, not just my teachers.  I was still writing for myself, only others could read it.  Now, though, for the first time I feel the need to impress, to live up to the standard that I so foolishly set.  What a mistake!

I'm going to ignore that standard and keep writing for myself.  If you'd like, you may continue to read what I have to say.  If you don't like it, go read some C.S. Lewis, or Orson Scott Card, two writers who, in my opinion, always live up to their own lofty standards.