be good to your writing

if you're reading this, you've probably already noticed my lack of capitalisation. maybe that made you click away. maybe that made you continue reading. if you do choose the latter, then thank you for giving me a chance.

this is not an academic essay: i'm not going to pull up statistics or surveys with the most detailed variables and try to convince you to trust me based on an inane number of experiments and observations. what i'm going to do instead is try to tell you why the concept of 'good' writing, at least to me, is obsolete, based on personal experiences.

i'm not going to lie- i've held different views for a very long time- and tended to agree with the more popular opinion, that writing on social media platforms such as instagram have led to the gradual downfall of pristine writing. but as i've continued to read and write and hopefully become better at it, i've found one thing that was common across platforms- and that is the amount of love that writers have for their craft. it's the fact that a person with a couple of followers on instagram continues to post excerpts from their notebook, whether it gains traction or not, and the fact that an author published by the new york times has the same passion towards his writing.

and to me, that is important, and it is beautiful. because your writing is important: the messy kind of writing, the poems you scribble down at coffeshops, the late night half-written epiphanies, the no-holds-barred notes app haikus typed on bus rides, the frenzied text messages at 3 a.m., the letters to ex-best friends you will never send, the writing that stews in your inbox, rejected from two publications because it just wasn't a right fit for them at the moment, the angry writing, the sad writing, the euphoric writing. all of it.

and i guess what i'm really trying to say is that your writing does not have to be good to mean something to people. it just has to be.