Being a high school student requires a lot of things, but above all else, it asks for your time. Classes, homework, studying, and clubs can easily fill up every hour of every day, leaving a student’s personal hobbies behind as collateral damage. This is especially true for student writers who, without school, might otherwise spend their whole days writing and editing their work. Personally, I would constantly find myself writing in between classes and in any spare moment I could steal. Balancing your writing life and your scholarly responsibilities can be a particularly difficult challenge, and even if you can achieve the perfect balance, being a writer requires more than just a schedule. As a young writer, you’ll be unpublished and inexperienced. It can be hard to know where to start and daunting to actually get started. So, how do you become a writer in high school?
Pay attention in class
First off, it’s important to pay attention in English class. Unlike some other interests, writing has a direct link to school, making it possible for students to work on their craft daily—if you’re intentional about it. You won’t be putting out thousand-word short stories during your AP Language classes, but your interaction with writing terms, sentence and paragraph structures, literature, and general grammar practice can all serve as inspiration for your own work. Along with this, English teachers are notorious for encouraging creative writing outside the classroom. If you feel comfortable enough, you can always ask your teachers for feedback and advice.
Related: How to Show, Don't Tell to Boost Your Writing for School and Beyond
Join a writing group
No writer is an island, and being able to receive feedback is an essential part of the process. So try joining a writing group to talk to other writers who get the struggles you go through with your writing. Some schools may offer creative writing clubs, but if yours doesn’t, local writing communities are everywhere. Check your local paper or online sources like Meetup to find groups in your area.
Make a flexible schedule
It’s important to understand that no writing schedule is perfect. Expect to miss a few writing sessions or not meet the number of words you set for yourself every week. Writing isn’t easy, and school can be unpredictable. Find which days and times of day work best for you. Morning or night? Three hours straight or small sessions throughout the day? Set goals. Some writers work by setting a daily word count; others base it on chapters or poems completed. Again, it comes down to what works best for you. Your schedule shouldn’t stress you out.
Related: 4 Ways to Improve Your Writing This Summer
Write across genres
Now that you have your writing schedule down, it’s important to not always write the same thing. For example, novelists will be tempted to spend all their time putting out chapter after chapter, but it’s ultimately to their benefit to invest some hours in writing poetry or short stories. The reasoning for this is that different genres require different skills: novel writing will place more emphasis on character arcs, sentence variations, and being able to fill up a page, but the skill of making a point in as few words as possible—which is essential to poetry—is also critical in writing. Working in different genres allows you to improve overall.
Submit your work
Writers need to submit their work. This is daunting for new writers and asks you to step outside your comfort zone and do things you’ve never done before, like create a cover letter and personal biography—but it's the only way writers can become established. NewPages.com offers a whole list of magazines and competitions geared toward teenage writers. Along with this, the Scholastic Art and Writing and YoungArts competitions are great places for emerging writers to get their start.
Related: How to Make Extra Money With Your Writing Skills
When it comes to writers, our minds often go to authors like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, or Victor Hugo—people who are considered the greats and whose books we study vigorously in our high school classes. We typically fail to remember that they all started somewhere small; they were once young writers, unsure and inexperienced. They started where all young writers find themselves today. Being a high school writer isn’t easy, but if you put in the time and commit yourself to your craft, anything is possible.
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