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The seventh grade.
I could just stop there. It answers the question after all. What kind of writer would I be if I stopped there without juicy details of the crushes I had and the love letters that I wrote, or that award winning story that made it to the local newspaper? Why would I start writing a story about where I started without including that fifth grade spelling bee where I annihilated the entire school, only to choke on the first word at nationals?
Mainly because none of that happened. I had always seen writers as these people that spent night and day writing books non-stop for a living. Day after day they toiled for the next page that would be the next best seller or New York Times number on read.
Then the teacher would slap the ruler on the desk and tell me to pay attention to correct adverb usages. I hated writing in seventh grade, more commonly known as English class. I always asked myself when will I need to know how to use adverbs correctly or the correct "there" to use in the sentence "they're going to the park".
Math was my subject. In seventh grade I was already taking algebra, computing number like it was no one's business. I did well in other subjects. We did a little debating in social studies and games on traveling the Oregon Trail. I hated current event, not really due to having to write them, but on the fact that everyone hated them. We got them done and they netted us ten points.
I've never been an "A" student. Math was an exception, but for the most part I pulled in B's and C's. For whatever reason, this year I was failing seventh grade English.
I blamed the teaching methods, the teacher, my fellow students, whatever I could to make them see it obviously wasn't my fault. Sure I hated the class, but I did my homework, kind of sort of. I participated in class, when called on the one required time at the end of the day, with the wrong answer, in the quietest voice I could muster. I did work on the computers during work time, for five minutes after deleting the spam in my email and surfing the internet.
Okay, I was a horrible student. Sue me. Now why does this make the step off point to me becoming a writer?
Some extra credit was needed. Bad. I was not going to be held back. I hated the class so much that taking it again was not an option. The class was in the second quarter when I started writing. It started at simple short stories from what I could pull from my head. Aliens inhabiting planet earth to study the human race in secret was the first. My second, a cop story where a trainee captured the bag guy. Yes bag guy, I typo'ed that one horribly as was so nicely pointed out to me. Finally, and one of my favorite pieces at the time, journal entries about a zoologist tracking tigers in the wilderness.
It sprouted from there. I liked writing these random little stories and if it got me a passing grade all the better. Passing at seventh grade was a "D" for those curious. Eighth grade wasn't much better, but I did pull out a "C+" if memory serve me well.
When I have the time I write in notebooks I keep scattered in my bookcase on what randomly pops into my mind or how life is going at the time. You won't see many of them here as I don't feel like editing them and making them into readable pieces of work. That and I can hardly read my messy handwriting, let alone copy it to a computer.
I still suck at endings.
About the picture, apparently they're (yeah, I know how to use the correct form of they're) required so I grabbed one from sample pictures. I wrote this at work
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more than meets the eye
Posted Jul 24, 2008
there's a lot of structure here that i really like. it's subtle, but that's something i appreciate, like the "I still suck at endings" that you close with. that made me laugh out loud. or when you opened the paragraph with "Math was my subject" and closed it with "We go... (
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