Craft and Creativity
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I write at least one essay a week (well, usually! I try!). I have been doing this for years, and I had my first piece published when I was sixteen. That was eleven years ago. And still, I don’t feel like a writer.
My writing has always felt like a means to an end. To push for a change in the Jewish community, as an earnest tefillin-loving teenager.* To affect conversations as a college paper op-ed columnist. And now, I see myself as a teacher of Torah, whose teaching sometimes takes a written form.
What has been the greatest obstacle, I think, to experiencing myself as a writer is how much “writer” feels to me like an identity that is about creating from scratch. While “is this novel” is one of the main things I ask myself before publishing something, alongside “is this helpful,” I have always seen myself as trying to put existing pieces together skillfully.
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