I just started reading ‘Anne
Frank’s Diary’. I’m still at the very beginning. But there’s one specific line
in the sixth diary entry that really jumped out at me.
She writes, ‘it seems to me that
later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a
thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. I feel like writing,
and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest’.
Doesn’t that just sum up how all
of us feel? We don’t know if we’ll ever be read or if anyone will ever want to
read our stuff. That’s certainly how I feel about this blog. But we feel like
writing. We need to write. And we sure as hell have all kinds of things to get
off our chests. Otherwise we wouldn’t be writing in the first place.
And now Anne is one of the most
famous writers in the world. Of course, I hope that none of us ever get
published for the same reason she did. But I suppose the point I’m trying to
make is that we never know what’s going to happen or how we’ll be remembered.
Van Gogh was never appreciated when he was alive, some of P.B. Shelley’s poems
weren’t published until after his death, even Darwin was seen as a crack pot
when he first wrote the Origin of Species.
I suppose this line jumped out at
me so much because I’m fairly sure I wrote something very similar in the first
diary I ever kept. And it’s how all unpublished writers must feel. But
everything we write, we must write for us. It’s easy to fall into the habit of
writing things that we think people will want to read rather than what we really
want to write. I know I’m very guilty of that. But the best writing we will
ever do is the writing that we believe in and have fun writing.
So, like Anne, don’t get hung up
on worrying about whether or not anyone would care about what you’re writing. Just
write it. You never know how you’ll be perceived in the future.
Not my most comprehensive blog
entry, I know. But thanks for reading.
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