It’s finals week at Grove City and I should PROBABLY be studying for my Biology Final. But I’m taking a short study break and I decided to write this post I’ve been thinking about for a few days. A conversation with my roommate inspired this–we were talking about art. Specifically, our art.
My roommate and I have similar stories of our art. He’s a musician, I’m a writer. We both put out works (him: songs, me: stories ) when we were younger and now, as we’re both about to enter our twenties, we must decide what to do with those older pieces. Do we take them down, hide them, try to forget about them? Do we leave them there and cautiously promote them?
This was a question I wrestled with for a long time. I published my first book when I was 16 years old. I’m very self-conscious now of this book. It’s not great literature by any sense of the word. The plot and characters are shaky at best. Even so, I’m proud of it. For a while, it embarrassed me, but then I had to recognize that this book reflects my writing abilities as a 14/15-year-old. It shows where I started, and what I write now shows my growth.
Art is beautiful for many reasons, but this is one of them. It can reveal the growth of the artist. It shows how their beliefs have changed, or how they’ve matured, or how they’ve found love, or gone through a hard time. And this is all art–writing, painting, music, sculpting, acting, poetry, etc. Very few things paint as vulnerable a picture of a person as their art. Re-reading some of my old writings, and then reading what I’ve written recently, it’s easy for me to see how I’ve grown. I’ve been conscious of some of that growth, and blind to it in other ways. Some of it was so gradual that I didn’t notice it until it happened, and some of it I noticed because it came about from specific experiences or events.
I’m excited to see how my writing continues to develop, and I look forward to the day I can read my current stories and see how I’ve grown. Speaking of current stories! Soon I’ll be releasing new information about an upcoming novel. A mystery campus novel, it follows two young college students in a world of academic intrigue and, no, it’s not inspired by a true story. I’ll release the tentative title soon!