This is a sort of biography of myself as a writer and my history of writing. It describes how I wrote and how I felt about writing at different stages of my life so far.
When I was young I wrote a lot of fiction. I had a lot of short stories that I started and never finished. Many were about animals—I loved them, especially dogs. I had a lot of ideas for stories, each one I thought would be the one that became a perfect, finished novel, but I soon became bored with each one. I think the only one that I finished was about a group of magic, talking animals.
In elementary school we had some assignments to write but not many. We mostly had group projects and discussions instead of essays. Since my school did not assign many papers, I did not have much experience writing papers until middle school. I wrote essays for English and social studies, and lab reports for my science classes. I always put effort into these papers and did my best, but I didn’t enjoy writing them as much as the fictional stories I wrote when I was younger. I mostly only wrote for school then, and I did have some opportunities, though not many, to write creatively in middle school. Sometimes in English class we would be assigned to write short stories, because of the short stories we were reading in class. Those were some of my favorite school assignments from that time.
I did not write for myself as often as I used to as I became busier with school, especially once I started high school. I wrote more and more for school and as the expectations for papers and essays became more rigorous, writing began to feel more and more like a chore to me. I had to write about subjects I wasn’t really interested in, such as certain time periods in history that I found boring or concepts in chemistry that I always knew I didn’t want to study further.
I spent a lot of my time doing school work, to the point where I never got enough sleep. I wanted to keep writing stories, but I simply didn’t have time. I spent most of my free time sleeping. I planned to go back to writing my own pieces sometime in the future, when I had more time.
The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, I took a class at City College called Introduction to Creative Writing. I was nervous to take this class because I had never taken a college class before and I wasn’t sure that I’d be good enough. But I loved the class. I loved the opportunity it gave me to write creatively again.
I graduated from high school a semester early, in December of my senior year. I decided to take classes at City College in what would have been the spring semester of senior year, to have something to do that semester before going to a four-year college in the fall. I took macroeconomics and Freshman Composition. There wasn’t much writing in my economics class; it was made up of only lectures and quizzes. Freshman Composition had many writing assignments, which I very much enjoyed because I was allowed to choose the topic of the major assignments. I chose to write about extreme prematurity, something I had been interested in for a few years. The class taught me about new genres of writing, like rhetorical analyses, and gave me more practice with others, like academic papers.
