As I often do at the beginning of the semester, I assigned this short prompt to my students last week: in one page, answer the question, how do you see yourself as a writer? I just finished them up. In them, some students talk about creative writing versus academic writing, some tell me stories of inspiring teachers, some say they don't see themselves as writers at all, some say they used to love writing but have had any enthusiasm for it slowly ground out of them throughout their schooling.
Partly because they were inspiring and partially because I'm doing some serious career soul searching which involves a lot of asking myself vague questions then answering them, I followed my own directions. I found it a useful and fun activity and am thinking about myself more prompts: How do I see myself as a partner? (well-intentioned); How do I see myself as a toilet cleaner? (bad yuck gross lazy); How do I see myself as a teacher? (will I see myself as a teacher?) Okay, never mind. I'll just stop with this one:
Partly because they were inspiring and partially because I'm doing some serious career soul searching which involves a lot of asking myself vague questions then answering them, I followed my own directions. I found it a useful and fun activity and am thinking about myself more prompts: How do I see myself as a partner? (well-intentioned); How do I see myself as a toilet cleaner? (bad yuck gross lazy); How do I see myself as a teacher? (will I see myself as a teacher?) Okay, never mind. I'll just stop with this one:
- I am a messy writer. I think faster than I type, which means by the time I’m done with this sentence, I’ve already thought of the next three sentence. The problem is, I end up typing the sentence that should appear three sentences later without the two connecting ones. This makes for some seriously disjointed rough drafts.
- I think that many “millennials” write this way because of interacting with technology our brains are superior and can think about fifty things at once.
- I know, I know, multitasking is a myth.
- I don’t really believe this. But I do think our brains very different than our parents. Unless our parents have ADHD.
- I’ve learned to embrace my erratic drafting style because if I stick to an outline, which I was trained to do, I never produce my best work; instead, I produce very coherent, very boring work that I am not proud of and that I suspect no one finishes reading.
- I strongly believe that the end of the writing process is having someone read your work. This can be the scariest part, especially if you’re proud of what you created.
- I believe that people write crappy stuff because they’re afraid of writing their best stuff and people telling them it isn’t very good. I did this for a long time, but now try to be brave about sharing my work. (see? I’m sharing it!)
- I just decided that the best form for this assignment prompt (for me) is a bulleted list because I want to say a lot and not worry about transitions so much. So I’m about to go change the format to reflect that. There, done.
- As a writer, I am almost always writing to someone specifically:
- When I write something academic or smart, I imagine I am writing to my boss, who is the most articulate and devil’s advocate-y type person I know.
- When I write something casual, I imagine I am either writing to my husband or best friend, or both, who think I am funny, which gives me confidence.
- When write something emotional, I write to my parents.
- When I write fiction, I am writing to a more gracious version of myself, because she shares my style but isn’t always telling myself I’m not a very good writer, like I always do.
- Right now, I am imagining I am writing to you. If you are reading this, I am writing to you.
- I am a competitive writer. I’m not going to lie, I’ve always received a lot of positive feedback on my writing, and since I have a weird relationship with authority figures that makes me alternately rebel and then make them proud of me, I spent most of my academic life (which lasted until I was 27) tyring to be the best writer in every class I was in. I never was. Eventually, I realized that I will never, objectively, be the best writer. Partially because “the best” is subjective, partly because there are just a lot of writers who are better than me. I have come to peace with this and am still writing, which I consider to be a great triumph.
- When I write, I let myself go. I don’t worry about it all making sense until later.
- Like, I typed that line “I let myself go halfway through the second paragraph, having no clue how it would fit into the rest of this piece. Then I typed this paragraph. Now I’m going back to paragraph two. (I wrote this part before I turned this into a bulleted list. See what I mean by messy?)
- I am a terrible speller and I hate proofreading my own work.
- In college, I always struggled with hitting the page limit, but now I have the exact opposite problem and I attribute that to being older and feeling like I have more to say and that no one is listening. (I had to adjust the margins to make this one page).
- When people ask what I do, I say I am a writer and a teacher, not always in that order.