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Writing
Your Creative Process Evolves When You Do
Growth is a creative process — but don’t discount the wisdom of your younger self
When I first began writing online over a decade ago, I wasn’t just building the foundations for my eventual career — I was awakening to the notion that I had a voice. And it was an intoxicating discovery: I had no shortage of things to say, and I lacked the neuroticism and experience that would otherwise have me hesitate to say them. That would come later. In the meantime, I became prolific: giving form to hundreds of thoughts, ideas, and questions that’d been piling up in my brain for a lifetime. I told stories I’d never spoken aloud; I experimented with structure and voice; I wrote from the gut, the heart. Occasionally, I even wrote from the head.
I don’t know how much of that work holds up, 12 years on (by my Virgo standards, I estimate about 2%). At my most prolific, I was publishing two or three stories a day. Now, I chip away at the same essay for months on end before I even know what it’s about. My perspectives seem to evolve at a quicker clip than my ability (or desire) to pin them down, to memorialize them before they slip through my fingers and become something else. And while part of me is content to be less guns-blazing sure about what I think to be true —…
