Me as a Writer

When I was in first grade, I watched a show called “Ghostwriter”. It was about these kids who would solve mysteries with help from “Ghostwriter”, who would take words off paper or a computer and turn them into words that spelled out a clue. The kids solving the mystery always used these special pens that were attached to a string, so you could put it around your neck like a necklace. I always wanted to be a part of the Ghostwriter team, so I got my own pen-necklace and was always writing little coded messages to Ghostwriter. I though maybe with my special pen, he could write back to me, too.

 Of course he never did, but the TV show made me excited to write in my first grade year and throughout elementary.  I loved writing about the adventures my dog, Hunter, and I would have. In my stories, Hunter could talk, sing, dance, trick-or-treat—you name it, Hunter could do it. We would go on vacations to Hawaii, where we would learn to hula and make our own grass skirts, and Hunter would do something like learn to surf. I had so much fun writing about Hunter! I would come home from school and half expect him to run across the lawn and ask me what we were doing that afternoon. His character in my books became so real, I wrote that he was one of my best friends in my School Memories book.

           
I also liked writing about my stuffed animals, Muffy and Hoppy, and their lives in Tilton. It was supposed to be a suspense story, but even in the fourth grade I could tell that wasn’t my style. It turned into some crazy tale about a villain who robbed the bog of eternal stench so no one could enjoy its stench but him. It was fourteen pages long, and my mother, thinking that was the assignment, went to talk to my teacher. She found that the assigned length was only a couple pages, and I had just decided I was going to write that much on my own.

The scene of my story was always so vivid in my mind-from walking down the street with my dog to the Bog of Eternal Stench Day Spa, I knew every detail. It was like writing in my own little world, and that little world was a place I would really like to visit. Now that I’m past the Muffy and Hoppy age, I would like to re-enter my own little world and write a whole novel, but I doubt I ever will. I wouldn’t want to write a book like ‘Twilight’. I want my novel to sound intelligent, and have a good plot. I wouldn’t want any of the badly written vampire romance in my novel. I would also want it to be the perfect length. Nothing that leaves you dying for more because of the too-short length, but nothing that makes you think, ‘When will I get done with this book!’

           
Moving on from the things I do like to write, I want to talk about the things I do not like to write: assigned papers-especially research papers. I think that my least writing assignment was our 9^th grade research paper. It was really interesting reading about the current topics, but the way we had to write, document, and even record the information was so controlled it made me want to scream. In fact, I think I may have screamed a few times sitting at home writing every last bit of information on an index card. I understand that we needed to cite the sources correctly, and that recording them on an index card was necessary. However, the fact we had to write every last bit of information we used in our paper onto one of those index cards was absolutely ridiculous. Also, I am not an organized person, so when we were forced to color and number code our index cards, I wanted to scream yet again. Writing the paper wasn’t actually too bad. The thing is-we had to focus so much on the index cards and organization, it became more of an organizational skill project than it was an actual research paper. I don’t mind writing-just don’t make me do all the dim-witted, cutesy stuff that goes along with it.

          
 Another thing I hate about writing nowadays is all the rewrites we have to do. In 10^th grade Honors we had to do four, even five rewrites sometimes, and this, too, made me want to scream. Where writing used to be some sort of escape, it has now become an arduous task, kind of like reading. I still love to read, and even write sometimes, but when it has to be a certain book, certain author, certain format, I just don’t see a point in it. Writing, reading—supposed to be literary arts, right? Art is supposed to be somewhere you can express yourself. With such a restricted boundary, I don’t feel anyone-anyone who doesn’t have a restricted mind-can truly express themselves.

           
There is one form of writing (and I don’t know if it can truly be considered writing) where I don’t think any of this applies, and that is instant messaging (texting included). Messaging like this is a form of communication, and unless you are an English teacher (or the daughter of an English teacher for that matter) grammar doesn’t apply to this kind of writing. Currently, it’s my favorite type of writing. Say what you want, and say it how you want. A few presses of a button and voila! You have an instant conversation. In fact, as I write this very paper, I have about five of those instant conversations going on. I am being told it is time to put my phone away and concentrate on writing this paper.

           
I think there are so many things that influence us as writers, and these are just a few that stand out among many. I think that if I were to write another ‘You as a Writer’ paper in ten years, I would talk about this assignment in that paper. It is one that stands out among many.