What I Alone Can Say

I knew from starting this blog that I wanted my first real entry (not my introduction) to be about how I "became" a writer. I had been a writer most of my life, but it took a while for me to discover myself. This is an essay I wrote about that experience of self-discovery and I would like to share it with you, my readers. It is titled "What I Alone Can Say".



It was Monday and I was a sophomore.

I walked into my SRT (Student Resource Time) class for what was homeroom under a different name. Another school day was underway, yet I only had eyes for fifth period Creative Writing. It seemed as if my writing career began in that fifth period class, but it didn’t. It didn’t begin in SRT either, even though that was where I discovered it. It didn’t even begin with Mrs. Liechty, the teacher who led me to that discovery.

It all began in second grade.

November 1992. The Webster Elementary second grade class had to write about Thanksgiving. I chose to write a very poorly edited story about how Thanksgiving came about. It was my first story, and it was only 99 words long. In April of 1993, still in second grade I wrote two more stories for school, one about toads and one about frogs. They were my first stories in cursive and they both displayed my apparent love for amphibians.

October 18, 1993. Three days before my ninth birthday. I wrote a story with a moral (we were learning about Aesop) for my third grade teacher, Mrs. Houin, titled “Wolf and Dog.” My spelling was getting better, but my grammar still needed work and my punctuation skills were atrocious. Five months later, I created a fictional story to inform why termites ate wood and a story based (not loosely) off the character of Pink Panther. Again, my spelling was improving, even if my grammar and punctuation weren't. To top it off, I was the most optimistic of all my classmates, making sure to add a nice “Happily Ever After” to the end of each story.

October, 1994. I may have been nine or ten, but I was in the fourth grade either way. I wrote a story called “Adventures in Basketball,” which may have been what the movie Space Jam was based after. April and May brought two more pieces of writing, still with terrible grammar and punctuation skills (not to mention sloppy handwriting that never truly left me). However, these two pieces were slightly different. The first, simply titled “Reading,” was a personal opinion piece on, that's right, reading. It showed a desire that not many other kids that age showed. The other piece, which I conveniently “borrowed” from a popular video game back then, showed my attention to detail, and ultimately myself as a writer, begin to grow.

November, 1995. It was my only story from fifth grade. The story was 23 words long, showed my lack of capitalizing a single letter, and only used two punctuation marks, both of which were periods. It was not my fiction this time that was enthralling. The fifth grade class had to fill out four pieces of paper, all having to do with what we liked to read and write, what we wanted to read and write, and what we thought of our writing, which included my answer to that question that I thought my writing was “unspeakably dispicable.”

The Plymouth High School sophomore class had been handed portfolios of their writing from second grade on. It was in Mrs. Liechty's SRT that I received mine, and it was then that I realized who I was. It was something that was handed to me but will never be taken away.

It was Monday and I was a writer.