I started writing when I was in school. I wrote essays and in my

When Sudha Murty declared, “I started writing when I was in school. I wrote essays and in my teen years I used to write sorrowful sad stories and poems as you do at the age,” she revealed a truth that has stirred through the hearts of humankind since the dawn of words. For writing, at its deepest root, is not born from ease or abundance, but from the restlessness of the spirit. The young heart, still unshaped by the full weight of life, feels the world with unfiltered intensity. Its joys are brighter, its sorrows sharper, its loneliness more vast. Thus the young are drawn to the pen, to carve their inmost feelings into form, to give voice to what cannot be spoken aloud.

The meaning of her words lies in the universal journey of the soul’s early encounters with expression. In school, the discipline of essays teaches the mind to order its thoughts, to reason, to persuade. Yet when adolescence arrives, and the teen years stir with storms of identity, the spirit often turns toward darker waters: sad stories, poems, lamentations of loss and longing. These writings may seem naive or overwrought to older eyes, yet they are sacred, for they are the first attempts of a soul to make sense of its own depths. Sudha Murty, like countless others before her, began not with polished masterpieces, but with raw emotion etched onto paper.

History, too, bears witness to this pattern. Consider the poet John Keats, who in his youth poured forth verse filled with melancholy, yearning, and questions of mortality. Though still in the spring of life, he felt the chill of impermanence and wrote as though each line were a shield against oblivion. Or think of Anne Frank, who as a teenager in hiding filled her diary with both sorrow and hope, weaving words that outlived her own short years and gave voice to millions who had no voice. In their youth, as in Murty’s, writing was not merely art—it was survival of the spirit.

The origin of such writing is the awakening of self-consciousness. When the child becomes a youth, he or she first discovers the vastness of the inner world. Emotions surge, questions multiply, and solitude deepens. The young writer instinctively reaches for stories and poems, for these forms hold sorrow better than the bare language of reason. To write in this stage of life is to build a bridge between the chaos within and the order without, to turn grief into creation, confusion into beauty.

Yet, Sudha Murty’s reflection carries another wisdom: what begins as personal expression often becomes the seed of vocation. Many great writers began with humble exercises of youth—scribbled essays, awkward verses, half-finished tales. These raw beginnings are not to be despised, for they are the soil from which mastery grows. Just as the oak begins in the acorn, so does a lifelong voice begin in the tender writings of a schoolchild. What is awkward today may become luminous tomorrow, if only it is nurtured with patience and courage.

The lesson is thus: do not silence the young writer within you. Even if your words seem clumsy, even if they drip with sorrow or seem too heavy for your years, let them flow. They are the training ground of the soul, the early sparks that may kindle into a fire. For in writing, you learn not only how to arrange words, but how to listen to yourself, how to understand the labyrinth of your own heart. And to know oneself is the first step to knowing the world.

Practical action follows naturally. Begin a journal; write daily, even if only a few lines. Let your pen capture not only joy but also sorrow, for both are teachers. Read widely, for the voices of others will guide your own. Share your words when you are ready, but treasure them even if they remain private. And most importantly, remember that writing is not only for authors—it is for every soul that longs to give shape to its inner life.

Thus, Sudha Murty’s reflection becomes a teaching for all who come after. To write in youth is to practice the ancient art of turning pain into power, confusion into clarity, sorrow into song. And those who persist in this practice discover, as she did, that writing is not merely an activity of school or of adolescence—it is a lifelong companion, a sacred thread woven through every season of the human journey.