During the fall and early spring of 2018, if you listened closely, you could hear the sound of insistent scribbling coming from a dark corner of a high school biology classroom. That was me. 

Armed with two notebooks, one black and one blue, and an arsenal of pencils missing erasers, I would sit down in what my school called “advisory,” an informal version of homeroom. There, I would translate my experiences into a story. I was writing my first novel.

For the past five years, I have been writing that very same novel. Born from the remnants of my grief as a fifteen-year-old experiencing my first loss, you might be able to understand why it’s taken me so long to pin down. Attempting to capture loss, loneliness, and most of all, healing, was a journey in itself. 

The following year I meticulously typed out each page. The next year I edited it. The next year I edited it again. Then the years after that, I read it over and over and over finding new things to change, replace, or just get rid of. 

Every year I would tell myself: this was the year I would let someone else read it. I took a few steps forward; sending a chapter to a local manuscript editing program, publishing pieces on my blog, sending a few pages to a friend (that one took me years). 

Every year I would tell myself: this was the year I would let someone else read [my writing].

It occurred to me that I would never stop rewriting, reworking, rethinking. Not until I felt it was the way a real book would feel. Whatever that means. 

The thing is, every time I try to write, I am held back by my own doubt. There is this unreachable ache within me each time I retrace my writing. I follow the lines and try to trap the words that satisfy me, but I only come up with handfuls at a time. Nothing seems to be good enough. 

I read writing from my friends that they’ve shared with me and realized that they get it—they get what it means to write the way I’ve always wanted to. I memorize the lines of the authors I want to emulate, but then their words block my own when I sit down and try to form my thoughts. I want to write like the way they make me feel. 

They are great and I’m just…Well, what am I?

Recently, I’ve been trying something new. I declared English as my major. I applied for a creative writing class where I’ll be sharing that novel with total strangers. I’m even here writing this down for you to read. So, I’m not exactly the same person I was in that dark corner five years ago. 

I’m learning that maybe there’s somewhere in between being good and being great— the space that aching writers occupy. 

There’s a way to exist there, no longer feeling stuck but instead allowing the possibility for something remarkable. Perhaps not a spot on the New York Times Bestseller list, but something else. 

Tears falling onto a page when something I’ve written breaks them open. A loud laugh at a line. A sense of finally being understood. A quote that they underline to memorize and hold onto. 

That’s what I want. That’s what I can live with.

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Written by Maya Jimenez, Fall 2023 Staff