What’s one thing you wish you had started doing earlier in life?
I’ve been writing for most of my life, so this question took me a minute.
I studied journalism. I worked as an editor. I wrote professionally. I’ve spent years teaching other people how to write. So it would be strange to say I wish I had started writing earlier.
But I do wish I had started writing for myself earlier.
For a long time, writing usually came with an assignment attached to it. There was an editor, a deadline, a publication, a lesson plan or some other reason I needed to get words on a page. Even when I enjoyed doing it, most of the time I was writing because something needed to be written.
That’s different from sitting down and writing simply because something is on your mind.
I wish I had done more of that when I was younger.
I’m not talking about keeping a diary and recording what I ate for lunch. I mean writing down the stories, memories, opinions, questions and random things that seemed worth thinking about at the time. Because a lot of those things are gone now.
That’s one of the things you figure out as you get older. You assume you’re going to remember everything that mattered, and then one day you realize you don’t. You remember pieces. You remember the broad outline. Sometimes you remember the story but not the details that actually made it worth telling.
People disappear from your life. Places change. Family stories get retold so many times that eventually you’re not even sure which parts are accurate anymore.
I would love to have something I wrote when I was 20 or 25 that wasn’t for school or work. I’d like to hear that version of me talking without the benefit of hindsight. I’d like to know what I thought was important, what I worried about, what I was completely certain about and how much of it turned out to be wrong.
That would be fascinating. And probably embarrassing. Which might make it even better.
I think that’s part of the reason I write so much now. One day it’s a devotion. Another day it’s bourbon or football. Sometimes it’s a memory, something from history or one of these WordPress questions that sends me in a direction I wasn’t expecting.
None of it looks especially important when I’m writing it. But over time, it becomes a record.
Not a perfect one. Not even a particularly organized one. But a record of what I was thinking about and what mattered to me at that point in my life.
I wish I had started building that record a lot earlier. I can’t do much about that now. But I can keep writing.
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Copyright © 2026 Doug DeBolt.
