Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.

– Cyril Connolly

I haven’t posted anything in a while because of crippling self-doubt issues. They’re not new – I’ve had them for about 20 years, when I suddenly started realizing that people were reading what I wrote and I was afraid that they wouldn’t like it.

I used to do creative writing. I used to write fan fiction. I’ve had stories rambling around my head for as long as I can remember, but around 2000 I stopped putting them on paper (or on the computer), because suddenly I cared about what other people thought of them.

This week I was binge-watching Criminal Minds on Netflix and one of the bookend quotes by Cyril Connolly really hit home. I had stopped doing something I liked because of others. I started focusing so much on what they would enjoy that I stopped focusing on what I enjoyed.

The Connolly quote made me realize that if I wrote for myself, I would always have an audience. And if I enjoyed doing it, if I enjoyed taking the worlds in my head and committing them to paper/screen, then I could revisit them whenever I wanted. Like I used to do. And if other people enjoyed them along the way, then that was just gravy on the biscuit.

So this WordPress may end up having various pages popping up here and there as I revisit the worlds in my head and pull the stories out. My challenge to myself is to write them for me, without second-guessing myself about what anyone else thinks of them.

They won’t be perfect… but I’ll bet they’ll be beautiful.