Affective Dimensions of Writing

I am in third grade. The teacher has given out an assignment to write a short story, and excitement putters around in my chest. She tells us that the story needs to be two handwritten pages. I ask her after class if mine can be longer. After getting her (surprised) consent, I write a 15-page story about a calico cat and a scruffy dog who go off on adventures together. One entire page of my story is devoted to a feast that they stumble upon--I take great pleasure in describing all of my favorite foods in delicious detail. My parents are called in to talk to the teacher after I turn it in.

I am eight or nine. My new favorite book has come with my Scholastic book order: Write up a Storm by Patricia Reilly Giff (the author of the Polk Street School books). This book is going to teach me how to become a famous writer--it's going to teach me how to get all the stories in my head into the blank notebook in my lap. I climb up onto the top shelf of my clothes closet where nobody will bother me. As my right hand starts to create my first characters, my left hand stuffs stale Conversation Heart candies into my mouth. I am going to be a writer.

I never knew what it was like to not love writing or to not be obsessed with words. I have kept a journal since I was six and have been involved in creative writing outside of school for just as long. When I was in elementary school, I wanted to write novels, and when I was in high school, I wanted to write poems. Now that I'm in college, I'm most interested in the genre of creative nonfiction and have been trying to manipulate the essay form for years. Throughout my (almost) 25 years of life though, one prevailing theme has been the intense need to record my own memories and thoughts. In high school, I kept no fewer than six journals, each with its own purpose and medium--I kept three online journals (each varying in content and intimate details according to the audience), two personal journals (one for experiences, one for thoughts), and one journal that I co-wrote with friends (we each made an entry and then passed it on to the next friend in line). I know that to most anybody, my writing habits will seem excessive. I don't expect to be understood. I just know that I have an intense need for written expression that will never be satiated as long as my fingers can type and my mind can think.

Like with so many other hobbies of mine though, I have found that my writing habits lately have dwindled down until they are hardly habits at all. Besides my blog, now I seem to only write when I have to--assignments for class, notes at church, phone messages at work. My passion for writing has never ceased, but my free time seems to have been taken away entirely. I mean, I've gone down to having only one journal, and even that has been poorly kept as of late.

Throughout my schooling years, my favorite assignments were always those that allowed me some choice in what I could write about and that allowed me freedom to let my writing voice be heard. However, even though most of my school assignments were not, in fact, formatted this way, I took the liberty of tweaking every assignment so that it became something that I actually wanted to do. Often, this rebelliousness has served me well--usually teachers praise me for my creativity and see that I have put more time and effort into the piece than the simple assignment guidelines called for. Other times, however, I have not been so fortunate, and I have, as the saying goes, fallen flat on my face. Those were the teachers that were the most formidable in my opinion--the ones who said, "This is how I said to do it, and this is how it must be done. I AM THE LAW." I didn't generally get along with such people very well.

In my own teaching, I hope to be a pioneer in reformulating the way that writing is taught in schools. I do realize that there is a time and place for every style of writing, but I think that far too many writing assignments are drafted to be as bland as turkey bacon. I believe that everyone wants to tell their story and that everyone, deep down, is a writer. Idealistic? Yes. But I think that with enough passion and enough determination, I might be able to teach even the most apathetic and stubborn students a thing or two about what writing is and (more importantly) what it can be.