adventures of a typical high school student

Hello everyone!

As a writer, my goal in sharing my work is to connect with other people, and hopefully help them in some way with my words. There are definitely pieces that I don’t end up wanting to share or post anywhere and that I keep to myself, but other than personal writing, the goal is to get your work out there… right? Today I’m going to be discussing why I’m still somewhat uncomfortable with sharing my work where people can see it attached to my name, and why I’m only comfortable sharing it with strangers when I do share it somewhere. If you’re interested in finding out why this is the case, keep on reading!

I’ve been writing on-and-off all my life, but I only started getting super into it this past year. I got my first poem published through a writing contest in fall 2019, and it was very exciting for me. I told my friends and family about it and they all wanted to read it, but I awkwardly declined. Somehow I had felt completely comfortable sending my poem off to a committee of strangers in hopes of them selecting it for publication where other strangers could read it, but I didn’t want my family and friends who were proud of my achievement to read it.

I think it’s because when someone you don’t know reads your work, the name it’s attributed to doesn’t matter. It’s just them deciding whether it speaks to them are not, and making their own interpretation of it. But when someone you know reads your work, especially someone you know well, they might try to figure out the inspiration of it or wrongly assume something based on the piece. Since they actually know you, the baring of your soul is a lot more serious since they know who that soul belongs to.

A lot of my friends don’t even know that I am a writer, or at least to the extent of what I write and what I do. I tell them I like to write in my free time or I’ll mention it once in a while, but not that I have a blog, or that I’m an editor for a teen literary magazine, or that I submit my work to certain contests/publications and hope to get published through those. First of all, none of my friends are writers, so this probably wouldn’t flow naturally in a conversation anyway. I’m sure they’d be supportive, but I wouldn’t want them to go and find my work and read it- not that I’m trashing them or even mentioning them in it, but just because that feels awkward to me.

I know it’s kind of weird, since these are the people that could help me gain more traffic on my blog or help me “promote” it, but that’s the thing. This blog and my writing in general is more of a hobby and something I do to unwind, because it’s fun and I love to write. Obviously I want these posts to reach people who they’ll be helpful to, but I want them to do that on their own merit, not by selling myself to people I know, and then having them read my personal thoughts at their pleasure.

This might sound very odd, but I’m assuming there are other young writers (or older writers!) out there like this too. Writing is so personal, and writing from your perspective and your experiences to have anyone who is a part of your personal life read it would be even scarier than someone who doesn’t know you at all read it, in my opinion. There’s a bigger possibility of judgement, or it changing the way these people in your life view you. And I don’t want that, so I choose to keep most of my writing private from my family and friends. I probably will continue to do so, unless by some crazy change of events it’s unavoidable. That’s my personal choice.

I hope this offered an interesting perspective as to some reasons why writers may choose to keep their work private. I know my family and friends don’t necessarily understand, but hopefully some of you might! Let me know if you have any writing challenges for me to try out in the near future 🙂

Brooke