This post was revised from the original on March 8, 2019
Start with this simple question. Do you love to write? Good. Find a way to begin. The writing will change over time. You will find your style. I prefer to write long hand first and then transcribe. I go through lots of edits this way. Then, I like to refine, change, edit and refine again.
If you are a bit unsure of whether or not you can do this, just know that we can never have too many writers. It is important to share what we have inside, for in sharing we bring to light that which needs to be uplifted in ourselves. As we are able to change ourselves more directly, we begin to have power in our writing voice.
I keep a file folders with bits and pieces of my writing in a soft sided basket. The pieces go all the way back to 1993. Some were done at the library and printed on a dot matrix printer. Some were for writing contests. I found that even when I was not chosen as a winner, I wanted to keep my work. I still have the pieces and it still matters that I took some time to write the entry out, edit it and care about my words. I had the courage to reach out to the world in the contest. I had the courage to share my words with a public I had not yet met. It takes the same courage some 26 years later.
There are communities of writers, writers groups, cafes where one is welcome to sit with notebook. laptop and a latte. Now that the internet is everywhere, there are FaceBook groups. I was fortunate to find an online community to encourage me to continue on after some years of writing and blogging and contests and grants proved to be unfruitful. That group is NaNoWriMo.
I joined NaNoWriMo in 2005 at the suggestion of an opera intern who was staying with me for the summer. That experience really changed how I viewed writing. That organization has grown by leaps and bounds. One year, I offered to design some web winner icons for NaNoWriMo and one year I visited them in their headquarters in Berkeley and at a gathering in San Francisco. Those experiences gave me a boost of confidence and a sense of community. I believe strongly that the sense of community is very important to our creative growth. In today's times, we have the privilege of choosing virtual communities that welcome us to share who we are and encourage us to become better at what it is that we want to do.
Incidently, writing can be other than novels and articles and poetry and such. A high school friend Elizabeth Herbert Cottrell has an open Face Book group called Revive the Art of Personal Note Writing! I find this type of writing keeps the channel open to all sorts of words with the added benefit that you know who is going to read your writing. I also find it a nice break when my story isn't progressing smoothly.
Another avenue for writing is a journal. A journal can be a real friend and sounding board. A journal can offer ideas for later fleshing out into a story. It can remind us where we were and how far we have come. A journal can let us know what work we would like to pursue.
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