How I grew as a writer
...s given a paragraph starting a story. My job was to finish the story off. The teacher instructed us to write in the most imaginative and creative way possible. Every week we had to read our stories out loud in front of the class. I felt so insecure because whenever I tried to be “creative” my lovely peers would often jeer and laugh at me saying things like “Oh! That was so stupid”. Elementary kids can get quite rude and critical. My third grade teacher had private talks with me saying that I needed to put more effort into my stories. She thought that I was not trying hard enough in class. She wanted to meet my parents but my mother couldn’t speak English and my dad was the sole provider of the household so he was always at work. In cases like this, I was often left bitter and frustrated. Writing continued to find ways to make me feel inferior. My teachers often criticized my work and I felt pressured by all the expectations that I had to fulfill. The many grammatical rules and different structures of the essay made me feel restrained and limited. I later came to the realization that my experience with writing was negatively reinforced. I learned in my psychology class my junior year that if you link bad sensations to certain experiences it would lead you to not like that experience even though the experience itself may not be so bad. I linked writing to belittlement. I didn’t think writing itself was so bad; I just didn’t like the failure I felt when I did write. In ninth grade however, I met a really good English teacher. He encouraged me and told me that I was too hard on myself, that I wasn’t as bad a writer as I thought I was. Even though I didn’t believe him at first, his encouragement grew on to me. After hearing it for so long, I started to believe that maybe I could really write well if I tried hard enough. That class changed my way of writing. It taught me to just do my best. I didn’t need to pout and complain that I hated writing. I think learning to accept myself helped me grow as a writer. In high school, I started to really enjoy my English classes. I was enrolled in the honors and AP English classes so it was hard but rewarding. I realized that while math often had an absolute value for its answer, English had no right or wrong answer. I didn’t have to redo the problem if I didn’t get the same answer as everyone else. As long as I strongly defended my point of view with good writing skills, that was the “right answer” and I was writing a good essay. This is really appealing to me because writing is really a subject with no wrong answers. This new point of view made me feel more comfortable with writing and so I got better grades on my ...