To A Future Writer: Writing Can Make You Bold

Inner editors are full of reasons not to write your story, echoing the voices out there that question if your story is worth telling at all. So why add to the chorus? We asked participants in our Young Writers Program to write a letter to their future selves about their hopes, dreams, and reminders of what they love about creating on the page. Today, 15-year-old Topaz reminds her future self of how writing made her less terrified:

Dear Future Topaz,

What comes to mind when you remember NaNo?

I guess I hope you remember the good things—the friends we made and the things we learned and the fun we had. Or maybe you remember the arguments and rage-quitting. If anything, I think you’ll remember the piles and piles of words we churned out.

Like, I don’t know if you still think this, but to be honest I’m pretty sure NaNo is the only reason I write, and am any good in social situations. (The two aren’t really connected, they just happened together.)

Who knows if I’d have kept writing if I hadn’t joined NaNo?

I doubt I’d ever have written thousands of words in a single month, and certainly not once or twice a year. Maybe short stories. I probably wouldn’t consider it a career option.

And when it comes to people… I’m sure you remember the first twelve years of our life when we were awkward and shy and generally terrified of interacting with people. I know it might seem a little weird to people who haven’t had this experience, but being able to explore myself online helped us start leaving the shell. (Now I’m just awkward. Does that last, I wonder?)

And ultimately, I guess it’s writing that led us to discover that. If I hadn’t been interested in writing, I’d never have found NaNo, and without NaNo I’d probably still be embarrassingly bad with people (and my terror toward the internet would have lasted a lot longer). Not to mention that thanks to NaNo there are people I can talk to all the time—and we even met some of them in person. That was so cool I can’t even. Wow.

Anyway, you’ll probably also remember being asked to write a letter to your future self and putting it off because writing letters is hard, let alone to yourself. But hey! If we hadn’t joined NaNo, we’d never have been asked to write this! …That’s not a reason why it would have been good to not join NaNo, by the way. NaNo’s great and I can’t imagine what we’d be like without it.

Writing is important. If you ever stop writing, I hope there’s someone around to get horribly disappointed in you. And maybe to stick your head in a bucket and tell you to start writing again.

Topaz, June 4, 2014

Want to write your own letter? Find out more about #ToAFutureWriter here!

Topaz is 15 and lives in California. She’s been a member of NaNo YWP since 2009, and has been an active part of the community since November 2010. In the years since she joined, she’s written over 470,000 words in event months alone, and it is absolutely ridiculous and who knows what she was thinking. (Though little of it has been worth exposing to the light of day.) At the moment, she’s revising the novel she wrote in November, and plans to self-publish by the end of June.