My first college paper. #paris

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.