Portrait of a Writer

Writing is not perfect. I am not a perfect writer. I will never try to be a perfect writer because, to me, that is dishonest and I am a big fan of honesty. I like messy writing. I like scribbled-in notebooks and bad handwriting, which is good because my handwriting is barely legible, as many a classmate will attest to.  

I think that my personality as a writer matches my messy room and my disorganized mind. I realize that I have started a lot of my sentences with the letter “I,” which according to almost all of my past english teachers is a HUGE no-no. And there’s a reason for that. But sometimes following that rule ruins the honesty of a piece of writing. What I love about writing is that, in essence, it is just a really long train of thought cemented in reality by little black letters on a page. Sometimes those thoughts don’t even make any sense together, but as long as they have been written down on paper, you can refine and shape them into something that makes sense to the rest of the world, something that might be worth reading.

In my mind, the only writing not worth reading is writing assigned to students in order to practice following a set of rules, not to use their perfectly functional, thought forming brains to speak their mind and add to the collective mind of society. Specifically, five paragraph essays and formulas for what each sentence should contain. Of course, structure and rules are necessary to some extent to be able to eloquently express an opinion or explore an idea, but the way those rules were taught to me as a student was completely devoid of imagination and free thought. 

Exploration of essay structure was never an option until my senior year AP Literature teacher told me I was not allowed to follow a formula to write my essays. Only then did I learn that the content of the essay did not have to follow a formula either. I was pushed to choose my own questions to answer and write for the love of thinking, rather than for a grade. 

Reading this essay, you may be thinking that my writing is scattered, or that I did not fully understand the prompt because I have not specifically answered the questions. And to that I say, your opinion is not why I’m writing this. Of course I am writing this because I want credit for it, but I also write to organize my thoughts. I learned how to write to get a perfect score according to a rubric and for a very long time I hate writing because I thought that that was how all writing had to be. No new thoughts. None of my own ideas. No passion. 

While I try to follow what my teacher ask of me in an essay, I make sure I only write things I truly believe. As a reader, I don’t like to be tricked into agreeing with the writer with clever persuasion techniques. I appreciate reading someone else’s honest thoughts, so I try to be as honest as I can when I am writing. Honesty can be risky, though, because when writing for a grade, your audience matters a bit more than when writing just to make a point. For instance, with most teachers, I would never include my pre-essay paragraph because it is generally offensive and deemed inappropriate for academic writing. However, since the point of this essay is to explore my perception of myself as a writer, I feel it is necessary to share that I like to get my creative juices flowing by starting off my paper with a paragraph of my unedited thoughts at the moment. My thoughts upon starting this essay are as follows;

“Listen up fuckers. What you’re about to read is not going to be a pretty essay. Im about to fill this bitch up with a whole lot of  random crap that spews out my brain and im only gonna have one draft of this paper because I dont have time to do more because i am a big ol procrastinator and i suck at time management. alright. Now that you know the truth Im about to get down to business and use proper language and shit. Right after i go to class.”

This exercise helps my to get more comfortable with the topic at hand, and also starts me off in the habit of being perfectly honest.  I used to sit at my computer for an obscene amount of time trying to come up with a riveting “attention grabber” that my teacher would not find boring or overused.  Needless to say, I had to come up with a new strategy and that’s when the “honesty paragraph” was born. 

Each time I write I start to understand a little more about what writing is about and why there are so many people who love to write. I do not consider myself a great writer by any standards, but neither am I insecure about writing. I am in an ongoing process of discovering my own voice and refining my writing technique, and I accept that I have plenty room for improvement. At the same time, I can look back at my writing in the past and see how far I have come, not only as a writer, but as an individual with opinions. 

I don’t think I will ever be perfect, or even as good as I could be, but isn’t that what it is to be human? To always be growing and learning? There has never been a human being who knew everything there was to know and I doubt there ever will be. 

Like Socrates once said, “The only real wisdom is knowing you know nothing.” Of course he didn’t say it in English, but you know what I mean. The biggest step I have taken so far in discovering who I am as a writer is admitting that I am really nothing special and not being upset by that. Everyone wants to be the best, but if that is the only reason we continue to do something, we will never be content, because obviously, we can’t all be the best.

I guess what I am really trying to say is that who I am as a writer is honest, and that’s about it. I am who I am, but not who I have been in the past or will be in the future.