MaKayla Waters
Magen Olsen
English 1010
7 September 2014
Inspire me
Inspire me. Take me away from the spell
checks, grammar mistakes, and five paragraph out line. Take away the
meaningless phrases and words about stuff I only pretend to know, the semi
colon, and useless indentation. Take me to a place where fiction is a reality
and there are no boundaries. Where the writing process isn’t followed by a moan
but rather a sigh of relief. Take away your voice and insert mine. Take me to
Paris, a place of freedom, and endless opportunities, a place that’s filled
with words that won’t take away an individual’s creativity but develop it. That’s where I learned to write. No that’s
where I LOVED to write.
Ok so I never actually went to Paris, I
was really just referring to a low lit, white walled, dream crushing high
school class room, that became my Paris.
Senior year I walked into creative
writing, a class I had been dreading since my childhood. I’ll spare you my sob
story of growing up in charter schools and being force fed tools, techniques,
and individualized grammar courses that would teach me how to drone out my voice
and transform me into robotic writing machine; Ultimately crushing my own individuality
completely and burying it deep inside. You can see why a class entitled
CREATIVE writing would intimidate me. Little did I know that class would change
the way I viewed writing and living completely.
That first day changed everything. My
teacher taught of freedom, of Paris, of places you go to find yourself, to be
enriched and absorbed in a culture to not be a tourist but rather to be an
artist. To find inspiration wherever you are. He taught of stealing like an
artist, to seek out and read other peoples work (and I’m not talking about
Charles Dickens and those other old guys but more of my peers work) to be
inspired by their words in order to find my own. My teacher became my preacher.
I yearned after each word he would say cause each one held a contradiction to
what I had always been taught.
I slowly started to transform my writing.
I stopped over analyzing every word, cautious not to be repetitive and to never
start a sentence with but. I eventually threw what I had known out the window
and started over. Nelson had us create anonymous blogs where we could write
about anything and everything. There were no limits. That year I took risks,
lots and lots or risks. I wrote poetry and rants. I wrote about my past, and my
peers. I wrote to change peoples minds about me, to make them laugh and make
them cry. I stopped shutting out my feelings and wrote what I felt but never
showed. I wrote for myself not for the grade.
He never worried about our grammar or
word choice or if our work was in the right format. He was far more concerned
on our content, and if we were learning about life just as much as we were
learning to write. That man altered my opinion on just about everything I
thought I knew about writing and the whole English subject itself. I was introduced
to poetry and I’m not talking about Shakespeare and Robert Frost poetry. No I’m
talking about SLAM. In your face life-altering words strung together then
spoken in a way people can’t help but listen. He made us try it. He made us
vocalize our work to preform it. That helped my writing in more ways a simple
grammar tip ever could. I started hearing myself preforming each paper even if
it wasn’t a poem. I found a rhythm in everything I wrote. I found my voice.
I love to write now. I love to see my
self in my writing and hear my voice. Even though I’m going into business the soul
crushing major, it won’t stop my voice. If anything my voice will propel me
through business and make me stand out.
Ultimately I
want my words to make a difference. To truly be heard, for them to change you.
I want to be the reason you believe in your self again. I want to pick you up
when you fall through with words not action. I want my words to be a lighthouse
unto others. But most of all I just want to write for my self and to love it as
much now as I did then.
