As many other writers know, the art of writing consists of deleting text and erasing words more than actual writing. From completely scraping an entire 100 page project to deleting the paragraph I wrote at 1 a.m., many of my ideas have fallen victim to the eraser. The ability to permanently etch my mark onto paper is the only thing that saved me as a writer; this is why I believe in the power of writing in pen.

When I started my writing journey, barely eleven years old and obsessed with Scholastic’s Spirit Animals, naivety and shame coursed through my veins when I looked at my work. I hopped from project to project, scrapping one idea after another, searching for the perfect idea, the perfect combination of words and sentences. From eleven to fourteen, I scrapped around a total of thirty ideas and over 500 pages worth of writing. Characters, world-building, plotting, all my digital work lost with one click of a button. As unimportant and unmoving as it sounds, the loss and imposter syndrome this unleashes on writers of all levels and all ages is horrifically debilitating. 

So I, like many others, stopped writing. I stopped expressing myself in the best way I knew how simply because I believed none of my ideas to be worth remembering or keeping alive. Why should I? As a young teen aspiring to be an author, why would I think of my ideas as worth anything more than the effort it took to destroy them? The lives and worlds, the tragedies and poems, the crises and comedies I had spent months tweaking- completely destroyed with far less effort than it took to write them.

Ideas, as idiotic or out of touch as they may seem, are never useless. As writers, even the ideas that are found to be minuscule compared to Harry Potter or The Hunger Games deserve to be heard, to be fleshed out, to be written.  The permanence and definite properties that a hand grasping a pen contains has always been irrefutable. The inability to ever wipe those ink strokes from the surface of a notebook allows every idea written to be kept, to be allowed to live. Unlike typing on a keyboard where one can just as quickly backspace and erase months worth of slaving and stressing, or pencil where a writer can just erase every odd shaped letter or little thinking doodle. I learned the difference the hard way.

Every blotch of pen in a writer’s notebook will always be valuable and worth the space it consumes. Now, at sixteen, I have tried to repent for my mistakes in destroying my lifeline to no avail. Nothing that has been eradicated can be remade completely the same. I have dreamed up another ten ideas in the last two years, all of which have been set in stone by ink so I will never see them destroyed. The fact that they may never reach the shelves of “New York Times Best Sellers” doesn’t matter to me so long as they continue to grow like vines in the pages of my notebooks. Because I know now that, as long as they are alive, every single idea deserves to be alive. This is why I believe in the power of writing in pen.