I Write to Create
I Write to Remember
I Write to Learn About the World Around Me
I Write to Learn About Myself
When I started writing, around the age of seven, I was only interested in fiction. I wanted to create stuff that was new. New worlds, new people, new creatures. It wasn’t that I wanted to escape from reality, but rather that I wanted an extension of it. I wanted more. More places to move around in, more perspectives to engage with.
I was inspired by my own imagination, as well as those of others, through books. When I was in third grade I was captivated by a series of books about cats living in the wild, called Warriors. Even when I was not reading the books I was in the world of these cats, running through the woods, exploring, hunting and fighting. I could sit still for hours and “play warriors” in my head. Then my friend and I began to write our own Warriors book, so that we could further engage with that magical world.
Anyways. What I am getting at through all of this is that when I was a young, I wrote fiction because I believed that there was more than what was around me, and I wanted to experience it.
I kept a diary when I was a kid. It was pink, small and boxy with a lock and key. It had a dog and a cat on the cover. I think I started writing in that when I was a fourth grader, because that was when I learned cursive. I filled it with letters that were big and loopy and pretty much illegible. I documented my days in that diary - I told it, in as much detail as I could, what I was doing with my time.
Then when I got my own computer - I believe it was my freshman year of high school - I began typing up journalistic entires about my life in word documents. I worried that if too much time went by without me doing this, I would forget about my experiences and never be able to retrieve them. I did not include much reflection or analysis, but solely focused on the details. What happened to me, where I was, who I was with. I envisioned myself reading this stuff years later and re-experiencing my youth.
The first analytical essay that I wrote was in seventh grade, on the Lord of the Flies. My first draft "thesis” was all good things come to an end, but my teacher told me it shouldn't be so cliché, so I changed the wording around a little. All good things are eventually lost, or fade away.... Something like that. I remember my ideas were triggered by the final line of the book: "Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy." Damn...what a great sentence.
I wrote a bunch of analytical essays in the years to follow, but it was not until my English 298 class in my sophomore year of college that I began to really care about my writing assignments, and view them as having a purpose beyond helping me get a good grade. For my final paper, I wrote a comparative analysis of two novels - Bonnie Joe Campbell's Once Upon a River and Dean Bakopoulos's Please Don't Come Back from the Moon. When reading these two novels I had been compelled by the two protagonists, and I found myself wanted to learn more about them. So I began my writing process by searching for answers to my questions about these characters. Why did they make the choices they had in the novel? How come one ended up happy, the other restless and dissatisfied? I became so deeply invested in my inquiry about these two characters that I forgot that an assignment had spurred my writing rather than my own curiosity.
Since that assignment, when I write analytical papers I allow myself to be guided by questions about people, and about the world around me. I write to obtain some insight into these things.
My first semester of college I was assigned to write a personal narrative. I had never done this in the past, at least not in a structured sense. My teacher said to start out with a question about myself. I found this a pretty simple task, because there was a question that had been nagging at me like crazy. How had the death of my mom (the previous year, due to breast cancer) affected me? Why did I feel so fine, so happy?
I began to write in a loose, haphazard fashion. No structure guided me - I just ranted about my memories, from both before and after my mom's death. I described in thorough detail the ones that stuck in my mind the most, because I figured that there was a significance to why I remembered them, even if this significance was opaque. Then I pieced them together into my essay like photo scraps in a collage. Writing this essay helpled me gain self-awareness and a little bit of clarity into why I was feeling the way I did.
Then last year, in January, I re-discovered how powerful of a tool writing can be for learning about myself. I was having trouble sleeping at night, and feeling very anxious as a result. I didn't know where these feelings were coming from. So one night at about 4:00 in the morning I opened up my laptop and startle to ramble - about my past and present, whatever came to mind. In the weeks that followed I wrote incessently, and through this writing I was able to find connections between past experiences and my current state of discomfort. Ever since, I have used writing as a tool to learn about myself.
Before this year, I never really wrote for anyone besides myself. I guess my audiences would sometimes be other people - essays would be intended for my teachers, etc - but the writing wasn’t really for them. It wasn’t doing them any good. It was always for me, to help me better understand something, be that a text, a sociological phenomenon, a research study, or a piece of myself.
But sometimes when I write, I envision another audience out there. I wonder how my writing would make other people feel. I think that this curiosity comes as a result of my love for reading. I read and listen to other's words - whether through books, articles, or song lyrics - in order to experience moments of connection. Moments of familiarity, of relatibility. These moments bring me happiness and hope.
This semester, when I entered the Writing 220 class and learned about the re-purposing and re-mediation assignments, my desire from the beginning was to write for the sake of communicating with an audience beyond myself. I took the diary-esque piece that I had written for myself last year (which I describe on the left) and used it as starting-off point for an interactive website intended for college students like me. You can learn more about this project in the next section of my website.
In the future I want to write with the intention of communicating with others. My ultimate goal through my writing is to spark moments of connection in my readers... moments where they think I'm not alone, it's going to be all right.