Extract from The Guardian
Some people are naturally drawn to writing – scribbling notes in the margins, jotting poems and little stories, mostly for themselves, sometimes to entertain others. I’ve always been one of them. Every Christmas, I asked for a new journal.
At first, they came with cute illustrations, questionnaires and only a few blank pages. Later, as my writing grew more “sophisticated”, the journals became simpler: a beautifully decorated cover, sometimes leather-bound, and clean, unlined pages that invited experiments – haiku (always about heartbreak), song lyrics, fragments of short stories, scattered observations about life.
I also wrote poems for every family member’s birthday – rhymed, handwritten, slightly chaotic but earnest. They still live in my parents’ home, a testament to both the passing of time and the slow evolution of the author.
When I started learning English at the age of 10, some of those scribbles began to take on a foreign accent. It felt exciting – almost literary – to write in another language. I had a pen pal in the US; we described our very different lives to each other. I used to carry a heavy, leather backpack to school and didn’t step into a McDonald’s until I was 15. She had bright, plastic things – objects that to us, post-communist Polish kids, signalled abundance. She sent me colourful stickers I never dared to use. I treasured them, like gold.
When I graduated with a journalism degree, I didn’t know how to write well. I wrote poetically, emotionally, often excessively – too much hyperbole and too many metaphors, too many thoughts spilling everywhere.
Then came the editors.
At a major newspaper where I interned, I sat beside them as they worked through my copy. Delete. Delete. Delete. The sound of the Apple keyboard became a kind of brutal metronome. It was so ruthless I often held back tears – and yet it was the best writing education I could have received.
A decade ago, after years abroad in Japan and the UK, I moved to Australia. Another country. Another recalibration of language.
The words were in me, but they were messy – misused, mispronounced. What I had, though, was observation. Curiosity. A raw need to express.
So I kept writing. Essays at first, for free. Then small commissions. Slowly, the writing life took shape.
This long introduction comes down to one thing: the making of a writer is neither neat nor linear. It requires effort.
It is a winding path, full of mistakes, red-marked edits, awkward phrasing and – this stings the most – rejected drafts.
Joseph Conrad (another Pole writing in English) never fully owned the language and yet his books reshaped literature. Shakespeare invented words because existing ones weren’t enough. Meredith Costain’s Ella Diaries – the series my daughter reads obsessively, torch in hand under the covers – is bursting with made-up words and breathless punctuation. It is wonderful. Children know instinctively what we adults keep forgetting: that language is alive, and alive things are allowed to be messy.
And now we arrive here.
In an era where writing starts to feel eerily perfect, where every LinkedIn post reads as though it has been written by an accomplished writer – if only the sentences didn’t all sound filtered through the same machine. And I find myself missing the friction, missing the typos, missing the realisation that the quirky phrase I admire has come from someone’s original thought process.
If you never write a bad essay, how will you know how to write a better one? If a generation of kids stops wrestling with words – because they arrive instantly, fully formed – how will they ever develop their own voice, their taste?
AI has flattened language. Removed the typos, the strange grammar, the gorgeous off rhythm that makes writing feel alive. All of that is disappearing and, with it, we’re losing something profound – the possibility of being moved.
So this is my small plea, to writers of all kinds – young and old, aspiring and accomplished, first-language or second. Consider your imperfect writing not as a flaw but as a gift. A signature.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed” is a quote often attributed to Ernest Hemingway.
We need that blood, that pulse of synapses. We need the mess of it all. Because without it what remains are sentences that are technically flawless but emotionally vacant.
Perfectly polished. Entirely forgettable.
As someone who learned to write in English through blood, sweat and tears, who once chased perfection as though it was a destination, I now find myself moving in the opposite direction. Back towards rawness, towards weird syntax. Back home?
