For the last month, I’ve been looking through a lot of old family pictures to get good Halloween stuff to post on Twitter. I got plenty of that, but I also found lots of pictures of myself as a teenager that set me thinking about some things.

What struck me was how, in certain ways, I’m a lot like that younger version of me. He wanted to be a writer, he was interested in politics, he loved Halloween and ghost stories… If someone met 14-year-old me, and then was transported instantly through time to meet present-day me, they would recognize a lot of commonalities.

At least, in terms of raw interests, there are a lot similarities. The differences come in terms of things like skill-level. (I’m a much better poet now than when I was 14, for example.) And, I now have a lot more first-hand knowledge about how the world actually works, as opposed to teen-aged me, who just had a theoretical model based on stuff he’d read or seen on TV.

What bothers me, looking back, is all the stuff teenage me should have taken advantage of, if he had only been willing to. But he didn’t know what would happen, and so just sort of kept his head down, reading books and writing stuff that only he read.

Basically, he wasted a lot of time. And it occurs to me that somewhere out there, there are probably lots of other teenagers and young adults now in the same boat as I was, who vaguely know they want to be writers, but don’t know how to go about doing it.

My hope is that they’ll read this, and maybe it will help them avoid wasting time like I did.

If you’re interested in writing, do lots of it.

Teenage me thought the key to being a great writer was to read a lot of books, and then the idea for a great novel/essay/poem would eventually come to him. Not really. Reading is great and important, but if you want to be a writer, you have to write what you want, not what you think you should write based on some books you read.

The easiest way to do this is figure out what kind of book you’d like to read, and then go write it. (That’s a cliche, I know.)

Bottom line: if you have read enough to decide you’d like to be a writer (and let’s face it, few people who don’t like to read want to be writers), then it’s time to start writing.

Don’t be afraid to publish.

In the old days, before the internet, it was hard to get anything published. But now, anyone can do it. And it’s been that way since I was a teenager. But for a long time, I still was hesitant to publish anything for other people to read.

Why? I was scared. Of what? I’m not even sure. That people would sue me, or make fun of me, or that my ideas or stories would seem stupid.

Basically, I was afraid people would laugh at me. Looking back, this was a hugely irrational fear. The big problem I face is not ridicule or lack of privacy, but getting people to read anything I write. Getting an audience is the hard part–it takes years of publishing your work before it starts to happen. So the sooner you start, the better.

When you’re a kid, you assume that the world is full of bullies who will mock your work, like the ones in school. And sure, the internet has lots of that, although good publishing platforms provide safeguards against it. But the point is, unless you publish it, no one will see your work. And who is hurt by that? Well, you, for starters. But also the people all across the world who have similar interests to yours, for whom you have written the perfect thing, but who don’t get to read it because you didn’t publish it.

It doesn’t matter if what you write is bad

In the beginning, I was worried that my blogs on politics were facile, that my poems were awkward and pretentious, that my stories were incoherent and vague. In short, I worried that my work was bad.

I don’t worry about that any more. I know when I’m doing good work or not.

How do I know? Well, simply put, I wrote a lot of stuff that was in fact awful. I wince when I read some of my old blog posts from 2009 or ’10. What was I thinking?, I ask myself.

What’s funny is that at the time, I was so concerned with not writing bad stuff, and yet I managed to do it anyway.

Writing is like anything; you get better at it by doing more of it. What I know now is that I’ve written a lot of stuff that’s pretty bad–but I’ve also written a few things I’m very proud of. And I couldn’t have done the latter without doing a lot of the former. As such, I’m not even really ashamed of lousy poems or blog posts from my past–I look at them as a cost of doing business.

Remember: if you manage to write one really great essay, or novel, or poem, it will more than offset however many failed drafts and ill-advised scribblings you had to generate in order to do it. And there will be a lot of those.