Young Writers Young Students

Now that we have made it to week 12 of first-year seminar, we are finally beginning to close out this eventful semester of letter writing. The portion of this week’s class I would like to highlight, deals with the blog on Letters to a Young Writer, more specifically our discussion on said readings. I selected “Don’t be a Dick”, “What If I Don’t Get An Agent”, and “Write Yourself a Credo” to read and discuss in front of the class. As for how I chose to read them, I decided to go on the actual blog style website for Letters to a Young Writer, since I was worried about being able to check the book out long enough to look deeply into these sections. Upon reading these, I noticed an over-arching theme with all of these writings. They all focused on the mentality of a writer and the pitfalls they have in their careers. “Don’t be a Dick” focused on the ego check writers go through and included an example of how writers can easily to go an event and talk about how amazing they are because they are a writer and not letting their work speak for itself. This is because a writer’s “bragging rights” really come from the quality of work they produce. As for “What If I Don’t Get An Agent”, this focuses on the stress and fear a new writer goes through in the process of trying to get editors and publishers to see them. This section really focuses on the fact that there are soooooo many people out there who will read a writer’s work if you just do a little research. A prime example shown in the article was, if you look through the dedications for a writing and find the people who assisted editing it, all you have to do is get some contact info and reach out to ask for assistance. The worst thing someone could say is no, and with enough asking that may turn into a yes. Finally, “Write Yourself a Credo” focuses on a writer’s long term mentality towards their craft. This writing talks about reassuring yourself and checking in to make sure that you still are writing for good reason and have solid morals and basis for your art. Though this section did make me pose a question, “How often should someone be writing these”, which I now can tell that is up to the writer and how often they feel their thought process in writing and feelings while writing change. All in all, I did notice these themes in other discussions on this book/blog, but it hit close to home when I realized the works I was reading really all connected through the idea of a writer’s mentality.