In school, English used to be my favorite subject. Being a Virgo means I love when I appear to be naturally good at something and tend to get frustrated when I can’t sit down and click immediately. Math was something I could never wrap my head around, too cold and clinical. I’m creative, more of a right-brained thinker. Going to a public school in strip mall country New Jersey left me with very few outlets for creativity, so I turned to writing. Poetry was always my go to; I liked the freedom it afforded a teenager full of emotions and lacking in discipline. I think as I got older, I let embarrassment stifle my writing. Leafing through old journals and blog posts I found enough purple prose to put Faulkner to shame. I was horrified at the idea that I ever thought this was good writing. I thought writing was just something that comes naturally to people and not a craft that needs to be practiced, which led me to the conclusion that I was a bad writer. I know it seems silly, but ego is a fragile thing.
I went to college for film and video so while my creativity thrived, my formal writing (at least grammatically) suffered. I mostly wrote in the format of screenplays and storyboards with the purpose of setting a scene and less focus on good writing. I still learned a lot about storytelling and while writing good dialogue is something I don’t think I’ll ever get a hang of, script writing helped strengthen my ability to describe a setting, person, situation in a succinct, no-frills way. It’s one of the writing skills I hold most important.
Currently I work as a freelance video editor, so I don’t do much writing professionally. I like to think my personal writing style is conversational but with an edge. I enjoy writing that lands somewhere in the range of informal, and storytelling that is loose and conceptual but isn’t afraid to touch on darker subjects.
I love reading topical web comics and graphic novels. John Darnielle is one of my favorite authors and musicians, and I long to have the same command of emotion through words like Laura Gilpin. I want to improve the cohesiveness of my writing, along with my sentence structure. I can feel myself doing it as I write this post: churning out fragmented sentences that all begin with “I”. My plan to improve so far has been reading more long-form pieces and trying to replicate styles I enjoy, taking cues and tricks from here and there. My grammar and punctuation could also stand to improve.
I’m not as strong a writer as I’d like to be and I think there are plenty of places I can improve my form, but I have a good idea of who I am and how I would like to write. My writing has come a long way and so have I, and I’m looking forward to seeing writing as more than just an assignment or something to hide away in a journal, but eventually something I’m proud to put out into the world.
Photo by Matheus Farias on Unsplash
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