In case you didn’t know already, April is National Poetry Month. And in honor of that, I decided to take on the challenge of writing a poem for each of the thirty days of April. I was scared at first of having to write so consistently. I usually find myself only writing poems when I feel inspired to, and lately I’ve been especially reluctant to. I think the more poetry classes I take, the more I’m afraid of writing because I have more reasons to think of it as bad.
As a creative writing major, most of your classes are meant to teach you how to craft but also how to critique. So when you spend your homework reading either amazing poetry or analyzing the poetry you don’t like as much, you become accustomed to feeling like you’ll never live up to expectations. You worry your writing has too many wrong things to fix. For me, the latter always blocks my creativity. My mind stops myself from writing because I’m trying to protect myself from my fear: that it won’t come out right.
I saw a lot of my friends and classmates hop on this challenge which originally helped me commit to it too. I kept them all in my journal and hand wrote each entry. If I’m being honest with you, I was sure I’d end up quitting or miss a day here and there but I stuck to it everyday. After seeing this mental trick from a motivational video, I’ve gotten into the habit of asking myself “so what?” So what if a poem didn’t come out like how I wanted? So what if I couldn’t create the best metaphor in a few minutes of a first draft? So what if I felt like this single poem wasn’t life-changing enough to be eventually published one day? At least I wrote it.
I got myself into the writing mindset every single day at least for a couple of minutes and created at least a few lines. The quality of them doesn’t matter as much as the effort, and that’s something I realized this challenge was helping me work on more than the poetry itself. Consistency helps because you never know which day will be your breakthrough, so why not try everyday?
I also noticed that I started to like my poems a little bit more the more I kept going. Each day held a new opportunity and I would take advantage of it differently for each one. Don’t get me wrong, some days it was so hard to even get some decent lines out as if it was a chore. But other times, I experimented with rhyme, with form, with length, with subjects etc. and it felt freeing. I got to delve back into that feeling of when I was younger and I wrote for fun all the time. I still do write for fun because I love it but I’d be lying if I said there isn’t a ton more pressure to be successful at it now. But the important thing is keeping and nurturing that childlike passion and confidence.
I don’t want to keep my writing a secret to hide away or be embarrassed of anymore. I want to be proud of my work. I want to stand tall and say “I’m a writer.” This challenge has taught me that not every poem has to be perfect and I shouldn’t let fear keep me from doing what I am passionate about. As I get better at writing, I’ll also get better at revising. That seems scary now but it can only help me in the long run. I might keep trying to write everyday or I might take a break once in a while, but I won’t give up.
If you’ve been thinking about writing, whether it’s for your journal or poetry or fiction or an autobiography, start today! Release all your expectations and embrace all your creativity instead. Once you make it into a habit, you’ll feel grateful that you started when you did.