To Read, To Write

“Oh, Magic Hour when a child first knows it can read printed words!—A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

I’ve been reading voraciously from the age of six years old—anything and everything. Before that, my parents read to me each and every day, for hours at a time. I remember vividly the first “chapter books” my dad read to me at six. He started with Junie B. Jones is not a Crook and continued on to the other seventeen stories. Strangely enough, my father moved right from these kindergarten readers of June B. Jones to Harry Potter. My reading habits have never changed, and I skip seamlessly between Jane Eyre, Winnie the Pooh, and Augustine all of the time. Because I have been homeschooled my entire life, reading as a family has been an integral part of who I am. Every evening we sit down together and my mother reads a book aloud to us—sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes three hours. I have never viewed reading as something you primarily do because you are “required to” for “school”, but was taught to read because it’s what you want to do—to learn and imagine and enjoy yourself. I’ve read so much that it’s hard to know where to begin, but in general, I really love good stories and read mostly fiction. Some of my favorite stories include, To Kill a Mockingbird, Peter Pan, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Winnie the Pooh, The Thirteenth Tale, and Till We Have Faces. I suppose some of the similarities that you would see in my choice of reading would be older literature, children’s stories or stories about children, and literature told in the first person, but it is certainly not limited to this. I, like so many others, am also a loyal and sometimes eccentric fan of the Harry Potter books, and have been since first hearing them at age six. Although I primarily read fiction, I also enjoy reading history, philosophy, and poetry. I’ve surely been affected by the books I’ve read, probably more than I know.

Writing and I have a love-hate relationship. Part of this is because, at least in contrast to reading, it’s quite new to me. I’ve only been writing actively for the last four years. For me, writing is difficult because there is so much I want to say, and getting started can be an overwhelming task—the blank page is a frightening sight to me. Once I get started I tend to overwrite, forget organization, and go into long tangents. I also have unrealistic expectations for myself to always produce a great paper on my first draft. Because of these struggles, writing has often been very frustrating to me. However, over the last couple of years, I have begun to learn the meaning of process, of rewriting, and of patience. The last two years I’ve been taking an intensive writing course, which has been extremely instructive in my writing, as well as a great trial sometimes. In this writing program, I’ve learned to write many different kinds of papers, including a summary, a research paper, a literature analysis essay, and a persuasive essay. Most importantly, this program has taught me to know the difference between content and form, emphasizing a rock-solid knowledge of form, so that it can be effectively used as a vehicle for content, thereby creating good communication. I believe that this is the purpose of form; it’s a tool to present the things you want to say in your writing. Apart from these academic papers, I’ve also done some journaling, fiction, and playwriting. Last fall I wrote a one-act play that was performed at a student-written one-act play festival, which was a very helpful experience. Although writing is sometimes challenging for me, I believe it’s very important for me to learn how to express myself in this way, and I’ve learned a lot about myself through my writing.