Everyone Can Write

From our youth, many of us have been taught that only special people can write. You must be a genius, an artist, someone with a unique gift, before you can put pen effectively to paper.

Nonsense! That’s the kind of twaddle that egotistical pseudo-intellectuals tout to trembling students. It’s ugly and elitist and just plain wrong.

Remember, when you were a child? How everything from words to works of art poured easily onto the page? Without pretentiousness or snobbery, children create beauty. Once we become educated, however, once we become morbidly conscious of critics and audience and the how-to’s of this and that, then our writing fails.

Brenda Ueland puts it simply yet eloquently. “Since art must truly be felt and cannot be willed, since it has to generate spontaneously in the artist’s inner self, there comes into existence willed, brain-spun, pseudo-art. And, one common kind of pseudo-art is that which pretends to be very hard to understand, subtle and abstruse, so that only a very exclusive few, a few extremely cultured people, can understand it.”

Children, moved by spontaneous emotion, rashly express with genuine abandon. As adults, we must revive such authentic creativity, often with a blinding flash of discovery that changes our viewpoints, forever.

The truth is that everyone is born with an innate ability to write. Whether we write with crayons or poetical feather pens, each of us has an inborn gift that can be cultivated, until it becomes as easy as breathing.

Have faith that you can write. Believe that you, too, are a genius. As you do, you will discover the precious artist within and a multitude of stories already created and ready to spill onto the page.