To Write or Not to Write

Ruby Appleby

I have been telling stories for as long as I can remember, but I was nine when I started writing them down. The first one was a blatant plagiarism of a Jacqueline Wilson novel, and after that I never looked back (though I did start coming up with my own ideas). Each story, each poem, was a masterpiece to me, perfect simply because it existed and because I enjoyed making it exist. Writing made me feel competent, powerful, capable of building something from nothing; there was a magic to it that I never found anywhere else. I knew that I would be an author someday, that I was supposed to be one. How could I not?

Then I became a teenager, and something strange happened: the stories I began so passionately started to trail off after only a handful of pages, and everything I wrote seemed lame, meandering, ridiculous. What changed? Well, for one, venturing beyond the teen section of my local library led me to a new world of literature, which instilled both inspiration and self-consciousness in me. I learned from the likes of Donna Tartt and L.M. Montgomery two things, almost simultaneously: that stories could be more marvellously rendered than I’d ever imagined, and that mine were awful. Here, I realised, were the real masterpieces. My stories were only lacklustre imitations.

I still dreamed up tales of close-knit families, young rock stars in love, girls uncovering secrets and facing tragedies and growing up, but I was now more hesitant to commit them to paper, more afraid of the blank page that once thrilled me. Often, I avoided writing entirely so as not to be confronted with my newfound mediocrity, but this only made it harder to return, because I’d stumble over clumsy sentences like I’d never held a pen in my life. Never mind that not writing was just as miserable as writing poorly (if not more), that I felt lost and unmoored and unlike myself. Better, I believed, to be unfulfilled than humiliated.

Except it wasn’t, and at the close of my teenage years I began to understand this. I had to stop procrastinating and start writing again, or else I’d never tell the stories I wanted to tell. So, at 17, I started writing a novel. I finished it, then started another six months later. I finished that one too. I also wrote poetry and some short fiction, a very small amount of which got published. Often writing was painful, and often the result was unimpressive, but, at times, the old euphoria at the act of creation resurfaced and all the reasons for doing it came flooding back: catharsis, feeling capable, clarification of thought, exploration of myself and the world I walked through. I was defying the voice of criticism that had taken root in my head all those years ago and, as a result, the lack of skill it bemoaned was, gradually, diminishing.

It would be a lie to say writing doesn’t sometimes still make me want to bang my head against a wall. I often feel just as mediocre as I did as a teenager. However, these days, the self-doubt seems increasingly irrelevant when faced with the fact that nothing fulfils me half as much as writing, and that it’s therefore in my best interests to keep doing it. The quality of my work is unimportant so long as it exists; I must live out my creative potential, however imperfectly, rather than lock it up and throw away the key. This isn’t easy – of course not, otherwise I would have mastered it by now – but it’s something I’m working on, and I implore every self-doubting creative to do the same. Make things, make them badly, then make them better. Forget perfect; try finished. See what happens.

Ruby Appleby is a student of English and psychology at the University of Otago. She wrote this piece as part of her Humanities Programme internship with Otago University Press. More of her work can be found in Starling, Flash Frontier, the 2025 Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook, and a few other places.