Copyright © 2022 Allison Achibane

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I know there are a lot of “how to get published” articles out there but believe me, this isn’t one of them. Instead of telling you what you already know (since you’ve read it all at least ten times now), I thought I would just tell my story. From the beginning….

Just like everyone else, my first experience of writing comes from school. Not college or high school. Middle school is when you really start to form opinions and put them into paragraph format. You know, the format that was ingrained in you so much that your first couple of essays in college suffered from it? The five-paragraph structure isn’t that bad of a start but no one does a good job of explaining to the kids “this is just a start”. Or more importantly, pointing out “this is for the test!”

Let me backtrack for a second because I know some of you reading this didn’t grow up in America. You have your own kids in school now so you probably know what I’m talking about but I also have some international readers. To be safe, America’s education system is all about ’the test’. Standardized testing is the monster that looms over every classroom teacher in the US. Because it isn’t truly unbiased or ‘standard’, our youths are forced to submit to it quarter after quarter. Sure, it shows growth, but it’s not a fair assessment and kids get left behind while teachers get fired.

Starting in third grade, we were expected to take a writing test. This is across the country and I’m not sure if they still do it but in my home state, it was yearly and it was serious. First, it was narrative, then persuasive. The narrative I did fine on, it was persuasive I failed. So I had to stay after school to be tutored for my writing. Why does any of this matter? Well, other than it is a setback for my self-esteem in writing, there is an important point I’m going to make. I’m a terrible speller. I’ve gotten better and spell check is my friend (most times) but after two weeks of tutoring (meeting once a week after school), my teacher released me. Why? Because she said, “your writing is good but your spelling is so bad the grader for the test probably got frustrated and failed you.” Mind you, we’re not supposed to be graded on spelling just formatting an essay and forming an argument.

This is the system I was graded on.

After that, it was teacher after teacher telling me I was good but never pushing me or bragging about me. There were students they bragged about so I assumed it was me. If you never have anyone cheering you on or telling you that you have a gift, you're likely to move on to something else. I did that as much as I could. It wasn't until college that I actually began thinking about writing as anything other than something to get graded on.

It was English 101 because even though I took AP courses in High School, no one told me I was good at Literature or writing. So I started at the beginning for fear of failing at the college level. The teacher was a grad student and very nice. It was her encouragement that led me to my first blog. It was a bit like this one, opinionated and only friends and family were reading it. But it was mine and I got accolades for it. That was my beginning in writing. Which is still a long way off from writing short stories and novels. But it was a start.

Who knows where I would be now if someone before my English 101 teacher in college had encouraged me as she had...

To be continued....