Nothing is more fatal to good writing than the temptation to let others tell you what or how to write, against your own best instincts. Writers are only human, and we can all only do our honest best — and we write best when we are most freely ourselves.
An idea that evolves on the page and takes on a life of its own, is more powerful because it comes from within us, and expresses something fundamental about being human.
That’s not to say our every utterance should be inscribed in letters of gold on blocks of polished marble for the benefit of future generations — merely that we write best when we write from the heart.
We may, sometimes, get a little bit carried away (with ourselves, or otherwise), and have to edit out a lot of surplus material. But if we didn’t write it in the first place without trying to second-guess our every thought, we’d never write anything.
And sometimes we just have to take the rough with the smooth – because, sometimes, we have to go through the rough to get to the smooth. Or else the “rough” has a character that’s all its own.
The whole business of writing, as with life itself sometimes, is often about doing our honest best at the time we do it.
It’s about having the confidence to be ourselves. You don’t look to others first for their approval, or for fear of what they might say. Life is too short –so you might as well be yourself.
It is in our flights of fancy, when we let our imaginations flow, our fingertips dancing across the keys, that we as writers are often at our most truly human.
It is when we choose to be ourselves, in everything we do, that we develop who we are: as writers and as people. That’s when we are at our most fully alive, and when we can truly call ourselves human beings.
Let the flights of fancy, flow: and whither they goest, we too shall go …