The One Time I Liked Writing
For a very long time, I honestly never enjoyed writing. Somewhere in the endless stream of practicing persuasive essays for the district writing tests through elementary and middle school, I was no longer looking at writing as anything other than an annoying, time consuming chore I had to do for school. Don’t get me wrong, I liked learning how to write. The format made sense to me, I got good grades on papers, but I would only ever put in enough effort for that decent grade I wanted. I carried this attitude towards writing all the way into high school, until a certain assignment made me break my usually “bare minimum requirement” pattern.
It was the last assignment of the year in my sophomore english class. It was just starting to warm up for summer; students could safely wear shorts and sandals in the expectation that the sun would be shining through the clouds by noon. The anxious excitement for the end of the year can very easily dissuade serious work by itself, and to be nice about it, that english class wasn’t very hard. This assignment didn’t seem that hard either, for the last one of the year at least. I was supposed to pick and research some place or culture in the world, find some myths to analyze, read a book or two written by an author from that area, and write a final paper analyzing and explaining all of that. I was so eager to be out of school, I honestly didn’t think very much about what I wanted to do for my project. I had no idea how badly that attitude was going to set me back.
First stop, the library. My English teacher brought the whole class down the street to the public library, a fun little field trip of sorts. Our teacher set this up for her class each year, it was almost infectious how enthusiastic she was about getting every one of her students to find something they really wanted to read and write about. The Bainbridge Island public library is pretty nice, outside there’s a stone patio, and a really nicely set up Japanese rock garden type landscaping. Our teacher led the class inside, to a classroom sized room towards the back. The librarians were ready for us, they had all different books set up on these tables laid out at the front of the room, organized by what regions they were from. There was even a little presentation by the librarians on how to find a good book for our project. To be honest, I didn’t really pay attention. At all. Until my teacher slipped this into the presentation, “I’m not sure if any of you will really be able to read this in our timeline, but if you’re interested, I definitely suggest it!”
Now one thing you should understand about me, is that I get pretty competitive. I’m a “rise to any challenge” sort of person at heart. I also absolutely loved to read when I was little, I was one of those little kids that carried around a book everywhere, and was up to date on every popular series. Reading meant a lot to me, and even though these days I’m more likely to be entertained by watching a show on netflix, or playing video games with my friends, reading is still something that I love to do, when I get the chance. So when I heard my teacher talking about Battle Royale, (author Koushun Takami) a book that would be a challenge, a book that was controversial, a book with darker themes maybe not quite inside what a normal high schooler would want to get into, I was intrigued. For a split second, I really, really wanted to read that book. Then the end of the school year hit me, and I remembered that I would have to write a whole paper about the book I read. Did I really want to get into reading a “hard” book, put in all the effort to read a book with deeper themes that I’d have to analyze? The answer to that question, unfortunately, was no.
I did what the bored, uninspired high schooler in me wanted to do; I glanced at the books from my chosen region, found the shortest one that didn’t look to boring, checked it out and went on my way. I lazily read my way through it, just another teen fantasy novel that happened to be from the country I had to write about. We had about a month in total to do the project, and I was done with this book in only a couple of days. I easily procrastinated another week away, only outlining the specific parts of my essay that were easy, the specifics our teacher wanted. I easily wrote out a paragraph about the Japanese myths I had read, another little insert about the history of the author of the book I had read. But for some reason, I avoided writing about what the beef of my paper was supposed to be about, the analyzation of my chosen novel. I wasn’t worried about this avoidance, I probably didn’t really notice it. I thought I could easily turn out some pages about it once I needed to. What brought me out of this cycle of putting it off was when I walked into class one day, and my English teacher opened class by announcing that there was a week left until our final papers were due. That’s when I thought to myself, “Alright Caroline, you should maybe, probably, definitely, actually write that paper now.”
That night, I sat down at my desk, glass of iced tea in hand, bowl of chips on the side, prepared to fabricate yet another boring essay I didn’t really want to write. I picked up the book, flipped through it, rested my hands on my keyboard and- nothing. The easy flow of words, accompanied by the rhythmic clicking of the keys on my keyboard was completely absent. I stared at my open Word document, that little black cursor mockingly blink at me as it hit me all at once, I have nothing to say about this book.
I didn’t know what to do, I was stuck. I knew trying to scramble for it would be messy, I honestly didn’t even like the book that much, how in the world was I going to write about it? I spent a few minutes flipping through said novel, frustrated in my choices. That instant is when I remembered the book I originally wanted to read, the one my teacher warned against because reading it would probably be time consuming, Battle Royale. The little glimmer of desire to read and analyze, understand that book came to the forefront of my mind once more.
I stopped by the bookstore the very next morning, and bought myself a copy. I read in all of my spare time. I brought that book when I went over to my friend’s house, I was even reading in the middle of my physics class. As the last weekend before the essay deadline approached, I eagerly devoured every word, every sentence. Amazingly, all this reading didn’t even feel like a chore. I wasn’t reading “just for school” anymore. I was reading for myself! I easily got swept up in this second novel, the one I actually wanted to read. There was so much this novel was saying, so much I wanted to communicate about it. I aced that paper. But most importantly, to my surprise and delight, I enjoyed writing it. I had something to say, and my writing was all the better for it. Writing this paper made me decide that I wanted to strive to bring that ease and eagerness into my writing again, whenever I can. Writing is just better and more fun when you find something you want to write about.
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