I started writing around nine years old.

My first books were made out of printer paper, the pages strung together with colorful ribbon pilfered from my mom’s craft box. (In the early days, our Christmas cards were handmade.) Eventually, I graduated to fanfiction.com, where I wrote under a pseudonym and slowly got comfortable with the idea that other people might actually read the things I wrote.

After that came my own stories (little more than fanfics themselves), written on my first hand-me-down brick of a laptop. I never seriously considered putting those online. I wrote because I liked to, because I wanted to get better at it, but mostly because I dreamed of becoming the next J.K. Rowling.

I’m thirty-three now. I still don’t feel anywhere near the level I want to be.

I’ve been writing for twenty-four years. I’ve probably been taking it seriously for close to twenty of them. But only within the last five years or so have I really had the time to dedicate myself to the craft in the way I always wanted.

If anything, getting somewhat better has made me more aware of how much I still don’t know. One of the strangest things about improving at writing is realizing how long you were bad at it without knowing.

I can see it when I go back through my old work. Some of my earliest blog posts make me want to edit them into oblivion while nobody’s looking. (In fact, I did do that for a few, before realizing how damaging that was for my psyche.)

I only started blogging because I had to for college, and there are sentences sitting out in the wild that Current Me would very much like to have a word with Old Me about. But I’ve learned how not to erase them. They’re partly how I got here; they’re part of ME, or my past self, which I could no more erase than cut off my writing hand.

Bo Burnham has talked about these same feelings in the outtakes of his comedy special, Inside (circa 23:41, “Youtube Kid,” for those interested). He doesn’t necessarily enjoy all of his early YouTube work now, but removing the embarrassing beginnings would also remove the evidence of how much he changed.

I understand that impulse. There’s something valuable about being able to look backward and cringe. Cringing means you’ve moved. Hopefully, forward.

Maybe that’s partly why I get frustrated by some of the posts I see in online writing groups, especially from people who are very new to writing. And I want to be careful here, because I don’t mean every young writer, and I don’t mean every new writer. I’m also not interested in deciding who gets to call themselves a writer.

If you write, congratulations. You’re a writer. There’s no licensing board. Nobody’s going to show up at your house and confiscate your favorite adjectives, or at least this writer won’t. What gets under my skin is something harder to name.

Sometimes it feels as though we’re losing the apprenticeship stage.

The internet has made it easier than ever to become publicly visible as a writer, but it hasn’t made becoming good at writing any faster. Those are two completely different things.

You can decide today, right now, that you’re a writer. You can make a Wattpad account, join a writing group, post your work, build a website, announce a novel, and start talking publicly about your process. None of that is inherently bad. In a lot of ways, it’s kinda wonderful.

Writers who might once have worked completely alone can find communities almost instantly. People can share work, get encouragement, exchange advice, and find readers without waiting for permission from some traditional gatekeeper.

But craft still takes time. A helluva lot of time.

There are fundamentals you cannot just confidence your way around. (And, as every millennial Uptown Girl knows, “fundamentals are the building blocks of fun.”)

You have to write shitty dialogue before you understand why it’s shit. You have to info-dump. You have to under-explain. You build characters who exist only to move the plot forward, and scenes that seem real riveting while you write them but somehow die on contact with another human being.

Your taste develops over time. Cruelly, that taste you painstakingly develop will come faster than your ability to execute it, so you’ll get to spend some length of time knowing exactly what’s wrong with your prose without knowing how to fix it. That’s how we learn.

I think writers need to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time. You need enough confidence to say, Yes, I am a writer. But say it with enough humility to understand, I have no idea what I’m doing yet.

Whenever I see someone jump immediately from discovering writing to presenting themselves as though they’ve mastered it enough to start writing a whole ass book, I feel frustrated. It isn’t the confidence itself. Gods know, writing requires oodles of it. You have to believe something about your work matters or you’ll never survive long enough to make it so.

It’s the ever receding distance between beginning and mastery that Bothers me.

We live in a culture where starting something new can become your public identity the moment you name it. The apprenticeship that used to happen in notebooks, bedrooms, classrooms, computer folders, fanfiction accounts, and printer paper books tied together with string can now happen in front of an audience.

Maybe that changes how it feels to be a beginner. Maybe when the learning is so public, admitting you’re still learning feels like losing face. Or maybe this is just the point where I admit that I’ve become an elderly millennial shaking my fist at the internet, demanding the youths respect sentence structure. Or Else.

It’s possible. But I don’t want younger writers to be less confident than I was. Actually, I think I want the opposite. I wish I’d had more confidence when I was younger. I wish I’d understood sooner that being bad at something wasn’t evidence that I had no talent for it.

It’s just evidence that I hadn’t had enough time cooking yet.

So, if I could tell that younger version of myself one thing, it would prolly be something like, You don’t have to be any good yet; being a writer means giving yourself the time to become one. And I think my future self would tell present me, You’re not doing so bad, keep going.

The problem isn’t calling yourself a writer before you’ve mastered writing. Being a writer isn’t the credential at the end of the apprenticeship. The apprenticeship is the job. Those ridiculous printer paper books weren’t proof that I wasn’t a writer yet. I already was one. I was simply a nine-year-old writer.

Then I became a teenage writer posting fanfiction under a pseudonym. Then I became a writer filling a laptop with stories nobody else would see. Then a college blogger. Then whatever version came next, and the next one, and the next.

And now I’m thirty-three, looking back at twenty-four years of writing and realizing I’m still becoming one. I hope I always am. Because maybe the more dangerous moment isn’t looking at something you wrote fifteen years ago and thinking, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, this is terrible.

Maybe it’s looking at it and thinking you haven’t learned anything since.

Daily writing prompt

If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?

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inspo: thinking about all the new pressures on kids these days // asking myself what happens when a culture encourages new writers to publish at the printer-paper-book stage // Bo’s philosophy // Welcome to the Internet by Bo Burnham // thinking about my terrible fanfiction // 2003’s Uptown Girls // this prompt // feeling Bothered, mostly

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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