So with the New Year comes a period of reflection, usually over the past year. My period, however, spanned a bit further as I found I was trying to come up with a second blog post and hitting a wall. So what do I do when I can’t think of something to write? I clean. During my latest cleaning extravaganza I came across my collection of essays from my senior year of high school. The teacher had us bind all of our drafts together and basically make it into a little book of all the things we had written that year. Being a natural procrastinator I sat down and began rereading my little archive which had a few additional essays from other classes tucked into it. After a few of them I started to realize how much different essays from high school and college shaped me as a writer. Most of them were non fiction too…still don’t quite understand how that works but non the less I have a blog post to share!
Not to sound arrogant but storytelling was never my problem. I even managed to get a 92 on a piece of writing that didn’t follow the assignment at all. (I misunderstood third person as someone else, not the writing style) Even my peer reviews stated how good the stories were. Mechanics, length and finesse seemed to elude me.
During senior year, Ms. K required us to write a “Process Log” detailing the changes we made on each draft and, most importantly, why we made the changes. This has had the biggest effect on my writing whether I realized it before today or not. While working on FOCAL POINT anytime I received criticism or went through to make edits I would reflect on why I made the change. Seems like it would be second nature right? But I remember having such an issue trying to write those logs and while I was never required to write one after Ms. K’s class the method stuck with me more than I realized.
While I had written two small books in high school they were solid plot, no real finesse or flow to them, so in comparing those books to FOCAL POINT I realized how much my college history classes shaped my writing. I know most people think that history is just regurgitating facts and events, but really it’s piecing together a story based on the information that has survived. Each class taught me about writing more and more on a more specific topic and increasing the amount of pages I could turn out. In High school writing 500 words was daunting, then college made 5 pages seem daunting, by the time my history senior seminar rolled around I could have sworn 25 pages on a very specific topic during a point in history I had shown no interest in was impossible.
It’s scary how teachers can push you into proving yourself wrong.