Relationship to Writing Essay

Words and Me
A Reflection on My Relationship to Writing

I don't think that it's possible to write about my relationship with writing without simply talking about myself as a person, because who I am and the fact that I write are indelibly intertwined. Writing has been an intricate part of who I am for as long as I can remember, to the point where the earliest memory that I have is of myself sitting at my parents' computer, attempting to type out a short, less-than-one-page story that I considered to be a novel. I honestly can't imagine a world in which I'm not constantly mulling over plot points in my head, or keeping a running list of novel ideas that I will never actually have the time to write, because I've already overwhelmed myself with at least five other projects. But if there's one thing that I've learned regarding my relationship with writing, it's that inspiration is fickle, and I am far more talented at procrastination than I have ever wanted to admit. When I dislike writing something, the words won't come, and there are times when I can barely force myself to even sit behind my keyboard and play at being productive. For the most part, this isn't an issue when I'm working toward writing one of my own novels, but it grows dangerous when I'm given an assignment that my brain refuses to even think about creating. In my entire academic career, I can't think of a single essay or research paper that I hadn't begun the evening before it was due, this paper included. My biggest struggle with writing has always been simply forcing myself to sit down and place the words on the page, even when I didn't feel like doing so. And while I have grown accustomed to doing so when I'm writing my own stories, I still need to teach myself how to write in an academic sense.

When I was in sixth grade, I had a close friend who also loved to write, and together, we dreamed of becoming published novelists. We carried the certainty that naive children hold, about how we were going to co-write a trilogy, and become rich and famous overnight. We had play dates where we would do nothing but sit with our individual notebooks, switching every few minutes to read through each other's words, and together, we reached an agreement that we would each write a page a day. She never actually did so, but I took this vow seriously, and began forcing myself to sit down with my notebook and my sparkly pens to pound out the words, no matter how painful it might be, no matter what else I wanted to be doing at that time. It was amazing how quickly this grew into a habit, until I barely had to think about planning out a time for me to write during a specific day; I just naturally found the time to get it done, every day, almost no exceptions. Yet during this same time, my English homework would lie forgotten in the bottom of my backpack, to be dug out and completed at eleven o'clock the night before it was due, after my parents believed me to be asleep. Despite the fact that I had devoted so much time to strengthening my writing, I never even gave a second thought toward whether or not I should be putting effort into my homework or my grades.

Part of my problem was that I was a horribly-precocious elementary-school student, the kind who did math for fun with her brother and was always reading at a more-advanced level than anything that we ever did in class. At the beginning of my schooling, I realized that there wasn't any point in paying attention to lessons, and from that moment, it was all over. Why write out my vocabulary words when they were all words that I'd known for years? Why pay attention to our early reader books when I had a chapter book hidden under my desk? As I grew up, it was difficult to learn how to pay attention to my classes; I don't think that I properly developed the skill until at least my Junior year of high school, and even to this day, it's still a struggle to keep my mind from wandering, one that I lose more often than I want to admit. And more than that, it is difficult to focus on writing academic essays, not when there are novels and stories that my mind wants me to be working on instead. Part of my mind is still back in the days where I could write out something stupid at the very last second, and turn it in to receive an A. I know that I should begin the work in advance, but there's still a voice whispering to me that I don't actually need to put in any effort, that I don't need to really try, and it will still work out alright. More often than not, this has led to me sitting at my desk sometime after midnight, pulling out my hair and practically crying in frustration over how much I hate my essays, complaining to nobody about how I could have written five thousand words of my novel in the time that it took me to piece together this two-page analysis of Huck Finn. By this point, there is no time for me to rewrite my essay, and no choice but to churn out words that I hate and turn them in for credit. And in all of my life, this method has never earned me anything less than a B+, so I have had no reason to change it.

Another reason why I’ve struggled with required academic writing is because I’ve somehow fallen under the assumption that the writing that I do for fun is more important than anything that I write academically. It dates back to the days when I was convinced that I was only one completed draft away from my big break, back when I believed that I would be a published novelist by the time that I graduated from high school. Even now, this belief carries over. Fiction writing is a part of who I am, in a way that academic writing never will. Even though I objectively know that the papers and essays that I write will determine my grades and play a large part in shaping my future, I still don’t see them as holding the value which my personal writing has, which makes it difficult to care about their completion as much as I should.

All of these faults were brought to a head when I was asked to write the Directed Self Placement essay this previous summer. I understood the importance of completing the essay, of course, and yet I still found myself putting it off for as long as I could. Finally, about a week before it was due, I knew that I had to make myself at least begin gathering ideas.  I did relatively well about gathering my sources. I chose my thesis before beginning my thesis, which I later realized was a mistake, but I was able to find several articles and studies which supported my claims. I collected all of these sources into a list, which included both the website url and a brief summary of the contents. It didn’t take long before I had collected a half dozen sources, and I began to pat myself on the back, believing that this assignment would be easy. And yet, my mind still did nothing to piece these sources and ideas into a cohesive whole, and I made no attempts to force it to do so. Instead, I did what I do so often in these situations. I procrastinated.

I continued to push off the actual act of drafting the essay for several days, until I found myself sitting in a coffee shop on the day before it was due, staring at a blank screen and realizing that I needed to begin the actual writing process. So, finally, I began writing, and rewriting, and wildly rearranging my essay multiple times. My main problem, though, is that I had done no preparation beforehand, and therefore, I had begun writing the essay without knowing for sure what I wished to say. After several hours of writing and revision, I realized that I was having difficulties stretching my current thesis to meet the page requirements, and I considered changing my thesis. However, after spending the past few hours building my argument, I did not wish to tear it down and built something anew – and more than that, I also knew that I did not have the time to even think of doing such a thing. Finally, right before my essay was due, I sent it in. When asked to fill out the survey afterward, I had to be honest – I did not feel myself to be prepared for academic writing, and the struggles that I had faced during the course of drafting this essay had only heightened the feeling. I now knew that something had to be done to fix my writing process, or else I would never be able to succeed at University of Michigan.

In short, there are many reasons why my relationship with academic writing will never be as strong as the relationship that I have with fiction, and that is alright. Novel writing will always be a large part of who I am, and it is what makes me into the person that I am; I would never dream of going without it. However, I’ve learned that I do need to improve my relationship with academic writing, so that I am no longer racing to complete essays the night before they are due, and turning in shoddy work because I have neither the time nor the motivation necessary to edit my work properly. I am hoping that this class will help me to improve in these aspects, so that I can become a better student, and can learn to write academic papers of which I am actually proud to say are mine.

Reflection

This essay was, as always, difficult for me to write. I left it until the day before because I didn't have the slightest idea what to write, and honestly, the thought of trying to put words onto the page was a little intimidating. I can write hundreds of thousands of words of fiction without issue, but as soon as I try to write in an academic sense, I struggle.

This particular essay was only completed after I stopped thinking of it in an academic sense, and began thinking of the essay as a narrative. At that point, it became a hundred times easier to think of words to say, and I finished the essay within an hour, with far less stress than I had had earlier. It did teach me a valuable strategy for creating essays, though I'm not entirely sure if I would be able to view a more academically oriented essay as being a narrative, so this strategy may not work with every essay that I write.