What inspired you to be interested in writing?
How do you see yourself in terms of your writing abilities? Why?
Fact
Early influences towards writing
Personal view of writing/ what it means to them
Personal view of their own writing abilities
What reinforced their perception of their writing abilities
A Red Blossom among Yellow Flowers
In a field of yellow flowers, a red blossom stands like a beacon in the night. At first, the rosy flower is praised for its uniqueness. But as time went on, instead of seeming like a beauty mark on a beautiful face, it starts to get treated like a blemish. The red plant tries to hide in between the yellow flowers, wanting to become like them. However, no matter how hard it tries, it just can’t fit in. At the end of the day, the flower pulls away from the sunlight, drooping low to face the ground. This flower is myself. I am the red flower among yellow, wanting, trying to fit in. Many times people think you are what you are born into. However, I just was not, and it took a lot of different experiences to realize that. The things that helped met through the process of finding myself and where I stand were reading and writing This is what writing means to the writer: helped find a sense of identity. The struggles with finding identity might have inspired the writer to pick up the pen.
When I was young I remember my mother bringing my brother and me to the library Fact. I can relate to this; my dad would take my sisters and I to the library all the time; planted the seeds for love of read/write. I was so excited with my own little red library card with the signature I had written all by myself. We would step in through the glass doors and enter a different world. It was a land where I could just sit, pick up a passport to a different realm, and start on a new adventure. Influence; the writer was attracted to writing for its ability to transport yourself and your readers to another place. I could imagine myself fighting off pirates, trying to survive in the jungle or taking a tour of the human body with the magic school bus! “It’s time to go,” my mother would say. But I would not be able to hear her, I was off swimming with the mermaids. She would have to come up to me and break the spell upon my little mind. But I was okay with this because I knew I could finish my adventure in the car, at home, in my bed, pretty much anywhere. Wherever I was there was a book in my hand. My mother and father were very happy with how much I loved reading. They didn’t discourage me whenever I was stuck in a book. I was praised for my love of reading. Fact. Received positive feedback from parents for loving to read; another inspiration for reading/writing.
I grew up in a very rural community. Most of my neighbors were farmers and more than half were related to me! My parents only received high school educations. My mother didn’t like school and my father wasn’t really involved in school because he was always working on my grandfather’s farm. In this rural town, where hard work and labor was most common, a little girl being born loving to read was a rarity. In a place where physical labor was most appreciated, I was very lucky that I was greatly encouraged to continue reading. My parents thought that it was a good thing for my education and how I would do in school. Don’t get me wrong though, I did have to learn about hard work and do a lot of physical labor. I wouldn’t trade that experience for the world. It has helped me to become a diligent worker and appreciate the little things in life.
Growing up in a rural area has affected me greatly. On a farm you work hard and together. My family is all in the farming business in some way so we all work as one and help each other out. I remember one time my father, my mother, my brother, my aunt, my two uncles, my dad’s friend, as well as myself were all running around in the pheasant pen trying to catch the pigs that had somehow gotten in there. It’s just normal that we all work together and help each other out. Because of this I am very close with my family. Everything I did was to please them because I loved them so much. Heavy influence from family
Around third grade, I had transferred to a new school and I didn’t know many people. I had my cousins there, but at the time, I was not really close with them. So I would read. I was that little nerdy kid sitting on the bus next to the window reading a book. I didn't really notice the things around me. It was just my book and me. Normally people who see someone reading a book would find that person unapproachable or unsociable, so they don’t really spark up a conversation with them. However, an unexpected thing happened, instead of being ostracized by my books, I made friends because of those books. I found that my cousins and a lot of other girls in my grade loved reading books too! My cousins and I loved to read Nancy Drew and Scary Stories together. We would talk about the books and what we liked and didn’t like. Sometimes we made up our own scary stories. We didn’t write them down but it was fun just to get them out there and try to scare the pants off of each other.
School helped with my love for reading because we would be assigned books to read and every book we read was good. We read historic stories about girls and boys from different time periods, we read fun stories with magic like Harry Potter, and we read sad stories like Number the Stars. We also did battle of the book which is where we create groups within our grade or the grade above us and are assigned a decent amount of books to read within a short time frame. We would split up the books so at least one book was read by two people and then our groups would compete with answering questions about said books. It was a really fun time and everyone got involved. Even the so called “popular” students made teams. My team was always in the final round, but only won once.
As much as I loved reading, I was not very good at writing. I didn’t write for my own purposes when I was young. I just wrote for school. I didn't exactly enjoy writing, but I didn't exactly hate it. However when I did write, I always liked writing on paper. But always in pencil, never in pen. I felt the pen was too permanent. I didn’t like seeing my mistakes. I liked to erase rather than cross out what I was writing. If there were too many mistakes on a page I would completely get rid of the page and start rewriting again on a blank sheet. I would always take the most time out of everyone whenever we had a writing assignment. I wanted to make the story, or whatever I was writing, good and I wanted to add a lot of detail to make it interesting. Perhaps the writer was focused on precision to avoid criticism from teachers. I liked everything to be perfect. I think I got that from school because I hated when the teachers corrected my spelling mistakes or any mistake I had. My beautiful white paper was hashed out in red and it made me see red. I was never very good at spelling so my papers would be crossed out in a million places A sense of fear in her writing abilities. These corrections might have lowered a bit the writer’s confidence.
When I really started to get into writing in about the 6th grade. We started reading Greek mythology and I found I loved it. There was something about the stories that were just so interesting. I liked learning how things came to be, like spiders, or how hope came into the word. My favorite were the forbidden romances like Persephone and Hades or Orpheus and Eurydice. It was then we had to create our own Greek Mythological story, and I was excited. I wanted to get a story out there that was good, fun and different. At the time I was infatuated with the moon so I wrote about the beautiful lantern in the sky and why it has different phases. It was a rather good story in my opinion, and my friend in school thought it was good too. I was very proud of it. However, I received the grade back with a B- and a note saying “I don’t get it” from my teacher. Teacher-student rapport is very important. The writer here has a low expectation in her writing capabilities. I don’t know if it was maybe just the teacher because she didn’t like me and I didn’t like her, or if it was just the way I wrote it. People my age understood my story, but I never asked another adult to read it so it's a mystery. This experience kind of made me not want to write for a while. Writing became something that I hated, even the writing for my own enjoyment. Since she’s starting to see herself as not good at writing, she gained contempt for it. What writing means to the writer is changing in a negative way. I started to like math and science because they just came easily to me. Learn the formula or learn the law and you got yourself an easy A.
Because of my upbringing, technology was not a priority. We didn't have a television until I was in preschool and even when we did get one it only had basic cable. Fact The only time I was exposed to more channels was when I was at my grandparents' house. However, when my brother and I started elementary school things changed. Our school had a computer class that we started around 3rd or 4th grade. We learned to type and used different educational and noneducational programs. I remember not being able to type on the computer and we had to learn the way to hold our hands so our typing would be faster. My parents realized they needed to get up with the times. So when I got a computer in my house around 5th or 6th grade a whole world of writing opened up to me. There was Aim and Xanga and so many other things to write on. It was fun sharing ideas and chatting with friends. It was a good way to get out my feelings and interests to others. I remember sometimes crying as I wrote how I felt confused or hurt. Writing on the internet is becoming an outlet where she can write an speak freely. When writing on the internet, there isn't much judgement on grammar. This may change the writer's attitude for writing later on. It was so much easier to write on the computer because if there was a mistake you just would backspace and voila! It was gone! You still had your clean pristine white paper full of just text and no cross outs. Of course that didn't stop the teachers from red marking my paper, but it did help me in the long run because it was easier to check my papers to make sure that I have my spelling correct.
My love for reading stayed with me in high school. I read all of the time and it made my parents worry. They thought I was not getting my school work done by the amount of time I was reading. However I always got it done and finished on time so they really had no need to worry. But they did. I guess it could also be because I stopped getting involved in sports. I think my dad was disappointed because I didn't really enjoy sports anymore. Living an active life style it was expected that you would be involved in physical activities. My brother and male cousins were on the football team and my female cousins were involved in sports as well. If they weren't, they worked. However I didn't follow in their footsteps. I started to like reading and I got involved in singing and acting in school instead. Two things my dad couldn't wrap his brain around. I was the only artistic one in the family. But because of acting, reading became that much more enjoyable. I was able to picture, see and feel everything the book was describing. My love for reading helped me in school as well. I was able to understand different styles of writing and look for the deeper meaning in books where my classmates could not. It was hard sometimes to get to the bare bones of the books without a teacher's help but it was fun and that is all that mattered.
It was around high school that my love for writing came back. I started to get bored of reading the same types of books and stories. I wanted to find something different to read, something raw. Then I found out how amazing the internet could be. I started to read internet writing. I was amazed by it. Some writing was so bad I would cringe. Others were creative and had a lot of potential, but just was not quite there yet. Then there were amazing writers that I found, and I couldn't help but think, “Why is this not published??” It was astounding. I would spend hours on our home computer just reading. It made my parents worry that I was spending too much time on the computer. I told them it was reading and, at first, they wouldn't believe me. But then, they finally saw what I was doing and lessened on yelling at me, even though they still did not like the amount of time I was reading on the computer. But it was these computer stories that got me back into writing. I wanted to write stories too! There is fanfiction online where you take characters from an already published story or from a movie and you can create your own story. This is perfectly legal because you give credit to the author for creating their story and their characters, but you create your own story with those characters. It was fun and exciting creating plot twists and setting up characters that normally wouldn't be set up together. It was fun to explore the possibilities. People praised my writing, begging for more and I did write more! Writing on the internet gave a writer a newfound confidence in her abilities.I haven't told many of my friends because it is really nerdy to write fanfiction. Exploring the internet and reading what others have written reconnected the writer with writing and gain a love for it. If you tell people you do, they immediately stereotype you as a nerd and unworthy of their attention. However, I'm not really a nerd at all. I was considered cool and semi-popular at school. I didn't want to be ostracized from those groups of kids who I considered my friends so I never told them. I only told a few close friends of mine.
However I had to stop writing fanficiton for a while because of school and getting ready for college. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I wanted a job that I could get a lot of money, have job security, and not go to college for along time. As much as I loved school I couldn't go to college for years and years. I just couldn't afford it and it wasn't in my interest to stay that long. So I figured I would go as a nursing major. I knew science, I knew math. I could get by easily. And I had good grades so every college I applied to I got in. However they didn't give me enough scholarship money because I applied so late to the schools. So I had to go to a community college. Which I am very glad I did. At Burlington County College there is a nursing course that you can complete in two years and become an RN. I got into the program straight out of high school. It is rare and they only allowed 5 high school students to do so. I loved the people and it felt good to help others. But I found myself crying everyday, not wanting to go to school. I couldn't go out to see my friends. I couldn't do anything but focus on nursing. I felt like I was losing myself. I was miserable. I talked to my mom about it and she saw how miserable I was. She was worried for my health because I was getting run down and crying and I never wanted to go out even if I did have the free time. She thought I was getting depressed and I felt like I was. I didn't know what to do. She told me do what makes me happy and it felt like such a relief to hear her say that. I knew my dad wouldn't be happy with me. And he would be very disappointed because he was proud that I was being smart and going for a job with good job security and money. But I didn't want it. It wasn't for me. I wanted to be happy so after I finished my first year of the program, which many failed, but I passed, I withdrew from the Nursing program. During the time I had tried out for the musical at the college because I wanted to do something for me and see if maybe I was making the right decision. I always believed if something is supposed to happen for the good it will. And I got a pretty big part for my first time trying out for a college musical. It was exciting and it made me feel like I was doing the right thing by not being a Nursing Major anymore. I knew I wanted to do something with books so I started to take some literature classes for the next semester. And I fell in love with books all over again.
I decided to become an English and Theater major. I always want theater in my life. Theater makes me happy and if I was good enough, which I'm not, I would pursue an acting career. But one must be realistic and realize when one has talent and one doesn't. So I went after my other love which is reading. I impressed my professors in my literature courses because I was able to read into the deeper meanings and express my ideas fluidly through writing. Many times my professor asked for a copy of my writing so he may show it as an example to future students. It gave me back my confidence and made me feel like I was doing the right thing. That same professor, Professor Alexander, helped me appreciate poetry. I never understood poetry before my poetry of the Holocaust class. I thought it was a bunch of rhyming words put together about love and feelings. But these were so much more in depth and so much better than I ever expected. There is deeper meaning in poetry too. What I thought was a poem about a mole ended up being a poem about how the world after the holocaust can make you feel like a mole. I can see how flowers can look like swaying bodies or how smoke and fire can represent loss of not just life, but yourself, your beliefs, and your hope. It was a new world. And I wanted to be a part of it. So I stared to write poetry. Not very good mind you, but it was my first real attempt. And I was happy to get feelings out, not by just writing my feelings, but creating an image to represent feelings. It was amazing. It was around this time I also got back into writing fanfiction again The writer has gained a depper meaning of writing; to her writing is an outlet for expressing what she's feeling and thinking.
To this day I continue on the path of the arts. At times my parents don't understand why I would rather be reading or writing when I could be doing physical labor. But they don't admonish me for doing what I love. They would rather me be happy. Sometimes I do still get the feeling that my parents aren't happy with me being on the path that I am on. And it makes me sad because I am so close with my family and I want to make them happy. But I realize it is my life and I have to do what is right for me. I shouldn't compromise my happiness to make others happy. To be completely honest, I like being the unique one in my family in a world where being an English major, aspiring to be an editor, is not actually very unique. So, as a new day dawns, instead of this red flower lowering its head in shame and trying to fit in with the yellow blossoms, it will stand tall and bath in the light of the sun. Knowing, yes it is different, but that's a good thing and it is beautiful.
