Doing Our Own Thing

Lately I am terrified of writing, and most of all, having my writing critiqued. I always thought I was a good writer because I was never told I was a bad one. My returned papers always had grades that were pleasing to the eye, until one day, I received a paper with enough red markings to make up a whole new paper of its own; it scared me. Am I not a good writer? How am I supposed to teach high school students to write papers when mine are being returned to me like this? Is it too late to change my major? All these thoughts ran through my head for a couple days.

 As I read through Bradbury’s book, I couldn't help but think to myself how self centered he appeared to be. Was I reading about the Zen of writing or a pieced together autobiography depicting his journey as an author? Nonetheless, with each page I began to appreciate the words he had written down for his readers.

No one becomes a good writer over night. On the contrary it takes years, and even so, you’ll never achieve a point where you've learned all that you can learn. I believe that part of our mistakes as writers is that we never write just to write. We always have a purpose. We write when we’re told to. We write because we have to. We write with the end in mind. And becoming so accustomed to writing with an agenda, we forget what it’s like to write just for us. When we do attempt to write for ourselves, we begin to mimic the writers who've come before instead of releasing our own “thing” from within us.

Bradbury thoroughly describes his thing as something that literally scared him as a child. It was something he would run from, something that followed him. At the end of the passage, Bradbury says that our own thing may well come out if we simply write any old thing down. By saying this, I believe Bradbury is instructing us as writers not to give our writing too much thought. I’m scared of failure in my writing—that my words will not be good enough. If we wrote down the first thing that came to mind, a masterpiece may very well come out. When giving our words too much thought, we are keeping “our thing” locked inside. The originality that is within us wants to come out, and when it does, we will grow as writers.

I was a month from graduating high school, receiving my last graded essay from my English teacher when she spoke some words that resound in my head from time to time. “Cat, you are incredibly intelligent, but extremely lazy. You’re a good writer, only when you want to be.” She was right. I always wrote with the end in mind, to receive a grade, or to merely say I had written something. And when I did write spontaneously, I had someone else’s work in mind—a book, television show, movie, etc. Bradbury mentions how from the age of twelve and onward he wrote at least a thousand words a day. I can’t remember the last time I did that, which I now realize would prevent me from becoming the writer of my highest potential.

We each have our own art of writing and attempting to make our writing like someone else’s will always fail, because we are not releasing our own thing. Bradbury thoroughly tells of his art of writing and does so using life lessons and pieces of his work, mentioning that we have our own thing we must allow encompass us, releasing it on paper everyday to develop and improve our writing.