What I’ve Learned From Writing a Poem Every Day for the Last Two Weeks

Who knew there was so much joy in writing limericks and haikus?

I’m not a creative writer.

I hung that pen up a long time ago.

Growing up, I wrote poems and short stories all the time. I won many writing contests over the years, had my work published in anthologies and even won county and state competitions for my writing.

When I was seven, I wrote a book about a girl who lost her little brother at the county fair. With the help of Reading Rainbow, I bound the book and everything. I still have that book; to say I was proud of myself would be an understatement.

I wrote plays in high-school and screenplays in college. I’ve been writing all of my life, but once I left university, the writing became more about what would pay the bills and not the creative writing I’d been doing since I could remember.

Also, I’m not going to lie; I find a lot of poets and creative writers pretentious a-holes who believe they are somehow superior to the rest of us writers because they do it for the art and not the money.

I’ve already made it clear how I feel about that kind of thinking: