Throughout all of school, we are told that we are going to be taught how to be a good writer. But at the end of the day no one can teach you to be a writer. We have to make the choice on our own. If you don’t want to be writer then you never will. They always say, “You are what you say you will become,” so if you say that you will account for nothing and that you aren’t what others say you should be, then you won’t. Everyone is gifted, “… but judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, and it will spend its whole life thinking itself a fool.” We cannot be so quick to think that everyone must do everything.

I thought up this poem while trying to think of a topic for a poem I was supposed to write for my English class. And I got to thinking that, it is impossible to think of anything. How do writers write what they write? Well, they write what they know. But I don’t know much about anything. I have no tragic story to recall or clever imagination to tap into, so how am I to write a poem? This kind of thinking has prevented so many people from becoming great writers, or great anything for that matter.

At times it doesn’t matter so much that what you write is clever or imaginative or the next best seller, but that you write anything at all. As long as what you right is true, it couldn’t matter any less if it is good or not.

My English teacher always tells us that if we don’t know where to start, then start right there. Just start writing, “I don’t know what to write… I don’t know what to write… I don’t know what to write…,” and something will come to you. More often than not you will start writing about how hard it is to write about stuff, like I did, but eventually you will write something down that grabs your own attention.

So many times we fail ourselves before we even try. The minute we tell ourselves that we can’t, we have already given up. Any athlete will tell you that they will never think about losing before a game, because the second they think that they may lose, they have already lost. You don’t have to optimistic and over confident all time to become great, you just can’t think down on yourself before you even try. Someone once told me that, “You don’t have to a writer to write.”