It began with the Muppets. The ABCs and 123s emphasized on Jim Henson’s Sesame Street, are what first set me upon the road to literacy in my early, formative years. While I do not exactly remember when I sat down in front of the television tuned to PBS to watch a bunch of Muppets talk and sing about the alphabet, I do remember mimicking them. I would sing along with the show, write and rewrite the alphabet on a piece of scrap paper with a crayon, and draw stick figure representations of Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Grover, and others, writing their names beneath. At the same time, I was introduced to rudimentary children’s books like Corduroy, George and Martha, The Cat in the Hat, Where the Wild Things Are, and so on and so forth, all read to me by my mother. At times, my mother would have me read along with her that, consequently, taught me to read on my own. I loved to read, and always found an opportunity to grab a book from the shelf and re-read it for the pleasure of imagining myself in the stories I read. While my ability to write came from my mother’s tutelage and lessons at preschool, it was not until elementary school that I truly learned to write.
Elementary school, I assume, is where most people learn to write. It was, in any case, where I learned. Rather than belabor the lessons learned with each subsequent book report because, frankly, I do not clearly remember them, and it has been many a year since I last read Where the Red Fern Grows. Instead, I would like to focus on one incident that introduced me to creative writing.
I believe it was during the third grade when our teacher assigned the class the task of writing a short story over the weekend to be handed in Monday morning. Needless to say, I was uber excited. I had never wrote anything creative until that point, and wanted to try and write something good without any help. My mother always wanted to include herself whenever I worked on homework (just to be there if I should need the help) but I wanted to hold myself up in the living room with Garfield on in the background, as I partook in my first self-initiated writing project.
I say self-initiated because unlike most homework assignments that took a fair amount of dragging my heels through the mud before getting started, I started this creative writing project immediately. I think it was the excitement of expressing myself creatively that got me so fired up, unlike the standard “read and report” assignments for English. Needless to say, I took the entire weekend to write my short story (all of four handwritten pages, I think). I do not remember every single detail of this story (I know my mother still has it stored away somewhere, as she kept all my old book reports from elementary school), but the crux of the story involved a Knight’s Squire delivering a message to the King about a dragon seen in a nearby forest. On the Squire’s journey from the country to the city, he would meet different talking animals that taught him lessons of bravery with riddles. I actually feel embarrassed talking about this story, as it is the first time I’ve reflected on it since the time I wrote it. Thinking back on it, the story is kind of lame. Nonetheless, this assignment from the third grade got my creative mind started, and introduced me to creative writing that made me a more literate person. After handing in this assignment, I began to explore creative writing more. I kept at self-initiated writing and wrote short stories every now and again on weekends throughout elementary school, junior high, and high school. Granted, these were merely scribblings on pieces of notebook paper that led nowhere, but it felt good to jot my thoughts down. While my interests in creative writing sustained an aspect of writing that I honed for a number of years, I never took creative writing too seriously until college.
When I attended junior college before transferring to university, I kept at my self-initiated writing projects, but never did anything with them. I would write something, put it in a folder in my desk drawer, and forgot about it. It wasn’t until my American literature professor and mentor, who knew I had done some creative writing, suggest I enroll in one of the poetry writing workshops offered on campus. I was reluctant in the beginning because I did not feel comfortable enough with my poetry, as I believed that it was simply not good enough. However, I never had anyone read my poetry before, nor did I approach poetry formally, so after a day or two of considering it, I signed up.
What the poetry writing workshop taught me, was to never underestimate the power of peer feedback. The overarching strategy of fine tuning my writing skills as a poet, centered around the feedback I received from fellow classmates that suggested reevaluation and revision of content, made me more effective of a writer. The majority of my poetry written before the workshop was long winded, and belabored the same ideas that I told about, but didn’t show. During that time before transferring, the strategies I learned for effectively revising creative work, did influence my skills as an academic writer also.
While peer feedback was one strategy I learned to take advantage of in my academic writing, as I found that commentary from people I knew and trusted was oftentimes the most effective, I also began to show more in my writing, instead of merely telling. Yes, I admit it, much of my academic writing was based upon summary with some analysis, and a thesis statement that argued an interpretive reading, but always left something to be desired. After I learned how to better acquit myself as a creative writer, I applied those skills to being a better academic writer. My approach to writing essays changed because I approached them as if I were approaching a short story or long poem. I wrote with clarity and conciseness in mind, and consistently followed through with claims, evidence, and analysis. Granted, I never found academic writing too difficult for me, but applying the techniques I was taught in the poetry writing workshop made my approach to essay writing easier.
Finally, I would like to discuss how this evolution of my writing came to a turning point as an undergraduate. In the last year-and-a-half of my undergraduate education, I participated as a student facilitator in the Democratic Education at Cal (DeCal) program, in which I (under the sponsorship of a faculty member) designed and taught my own 2 unit courses to fellow undergraduates. One of these classes, a poetry writing workshop, I co-facilitated with a friend and fellow poet. During the class, we would made sure that peer feedback was paramount during classroom discussion. Our faculty sponsor, himself a poet, always emphasized the importance of collaborative peer critiques, as he always claimed it a effective way to approach revision.
I remember the previous semester, while sitting in our sponsor’s American poetry class, I would scribble thesis ideas or preliminary analyses for an upcoming paper in my notebook. Later, with friends who were enrolled in the same class, we would sit underneath an oak tree, and peer review our ideas. While it was more of a brainstorming session, it was a cooperative, collaborative effort that exemplified the process of being a better writer (and reader) of literature. We repeated this process for every paper required for that class, and personally, the feedback I received from my peers made me take a step back and reexamine my ideas or approach to an essay. In the end, I feel it made me a better writer, and my self-reflective approach to academic writing continues today as a graduate student at Texas Tech.
As a graduate student, I find myself participating more and more in self-reflection during a writing project. As my critical eye has evolved throughout the years, I am more apt to actively reevaluate what I write, so that I can consistently refine my skills as a writer. I feel this is how my writing has evolved to this point, and while I am more involved with academic writing than creative writing nowadays, the way my writing abilities have been shaped over the years, will continue to influence me. Above all else, however, I remember that it all began with Muppets.
