The difficult thing about writing is organizing all the crap that is going a mile a minute in your brain. Where to begin? This question has haunted me all my life when it comes time to write. But once I solve this puzzle the pieces just fall into place. Each idea stems from the next, like a symphony of various instruments coming together to form the most poetic sounds. But every so often there is a sour note. And in some cases the sour notes just keep on coming. For me, my life in English class has always been one of anonymity and one failed attempt after another. I never really appreciated the power of the written word. It was always just an assignment, I never knew what I could accomplish. But I was always on the brink, if I just learned that one elusive skill that everyone else seems to know...
My English teachers in high school never really spent the time teaching me how to become a better writer. They always gave the same speech, that it was something that clicks, it will just come to you. So I figured I had a better chance finding the Holy Grail than I did getting a "B" in the class. Effort was not a question, at first. I tried and tried but always got the same result that I was so close my teacher told me. It was 11th grade and for the past two years I had the same teacher, Mr. McElroy, who taught me to loathe English with a passion. Almost everyday we had to to book work and grammar that was learned in grade school. Needless to say I did well in those classes but I did not learn anything in the advancement of my English writings. And in 11th grade I was being asked to write at a college level but was, "just missing it a certain uniqueness..."
The best I could achieve was an average score but then something happened that I did not intend. I started to emulate what I saw in movies, television, and other media outlets. I also copied what I read in magazines, books, anything that was inspirational to me. And it just clicked. I do not know how or exactly when, but it did, yet it was a only a flicker of a flame, nothing more. Things just started to fall into place, when I wrote I used such elevated diction that I was confused. Who was writing this? It felt like I was possessed by someone else and I was just witnessing what was happening. If I had to guess at what happened, I can attribute what occurred to a bolster in confidence. My voice came out when I was confident.
My voice, your voice, her voice, his voice, everyone's is different and everyone has one waiting to be tapped into. But once you find it, once you learn what you can accomplish, everything just falls into place, like a row of dominoes. And from then on it just becomes a matter of what the heck am I going to write about? And then the piste resistance, where to begin?
The very mysterious Cuban,
ReplyDeleteI have to admit I was very hesitant in regarding you as “Cuban” but found no other name to call you by, so please excuse me! After reading your excerpt on the Dominoes Effect of writing, I felt that my indescribable feelings have been written for me. Personally, I was never good at English, but I loved writing. It got to the point where I just ignored all of my teachers’ requirements and just said what I had to say. I hate that long train of thought; I completely lose myself in trying to slow it down to catch. It does not matter how unprofessional or inexperienced you sound in regards to your topic, just write and write all the things you know and get the information out on paper –where it is safe from disappearing.
Guilty as charged, I also often use the thesaurus to exchange common words for more articulate vocabularies. Maybe it was somewhere in sixth grade where my teacher introduced me to something better than a dictionary, the thesaurus! Often, it was harder to understanding words with a dictionary because I still had no sense of what was explained; the thesaurus on the other hand, uses words that have a similar meaning –it gave me more confidence.