Time Passed, a Reflection on my Writing.

For a summer writing course I truly expected to be writing bland, straightforward, rigid papers all semester. When universities usually say their course is “creative” it generally means they just want you to argue something that isn’t academic in nature, though still extremely rigid in academic structure. I often feel alienated from my own voice in these courses. To have this course be something where I not only have to use my own voice, but discover it, was a refreshing change of pace.

Though at the core of the experience, the act of writing had a huge impact on my own journey within this course, at least to my recognition. Truly the way I felt I learned in this course was through the revision process, and feedback I received from my peers, as well as the professor. In my mind I felt I had written quite freely and outspoken, only to have my feedback come to me saying my work lacked a personal voice. At other points I felt I would add personal voice, and I would have my work come back saying it was too rant-like, and lacked enough definition. This back and forth felt very difficult for me to balance, since I felt I was never meeting the standard set before me, but ultimately I found myself becoming a much better writer because of it.

To look back upon some of my early work in WP1 and then comparing it to the level of work I was putting out with WP3, it was worlds different. I truly felt with WP3 I had achieved a level of work that I was proud of. I have always struggled with my personal voice when it came to writing abstractly without the guidance of a rubric. I have never really been able to quite put my thoughts on paper the way I wanted to. At time’s I would blame this on writer’s block, or whatever I could just to get away from writing something I didn’t feel good about. At the end of the day, the thing that helped me through this roadblock was just writing, anything.

With in class writing assignments Daniel would give us prompts in the beginning of the semester, and you would just write, whatever came to mind, you would only have 10 minutes per prompt at times, so you couldn’t sit and think with it for too long. In essence, this was Daniel’s way of combating writer’s block. He stated at one point, “the best way to get through writer’s block is to just write. Once you are able to break through the block by getting whatever is sticking you in the mud out, writing will come easy.” He was absolutely right. In my google drive I have pages and pages of random word vomit that have no true purpose other than to get me writing. These are the things no one will ever see, but the things that they have paved the way for, are works that I truly feel succinct in..

Something I have also never experienced within any other writing course is the ability to go back and revise a piece after submission with the given feedback. The ability for me to take something and revise it over and over again is something that I have ultimately ignored for much of my own writing because the only feedback I typically receive before submitting is my own. Even after submission, the feedback I would receive was in reference to the structure of the writing, or relevance to the prompt given, not my writing itself. For me to get feedback on my writing, as in my own style of writing, and not the relevance to a subject, or academic structure, and then be given the chance to change my work for resubmission was absolutely foreign.

I feel too often in writing for school it is quite cut and dry. We are told we have deadlines for rough drafts, and then a final paper submission date, but at the deadlines for those drafts we don’t get any feedback. The deadlines for drafts aren’t graded half the time, it’s mainly meant as a time tracker. Only the final product at the ultimate deadline is treated as a piece of judgeable work, and we never at any point return to that work for reexamination. Our work is treated as disposable, expendable. To have my work be considered something of recurring value forced me to reassess the level of quality I was producing, and really take my time creating something I valued further than just a one time grade. For the course to take place on medium I felt that it was highly influential on my own view of my work, because it was placing my work in a position where it could be viewed outside of the frame of the class itself. My family, my friends, and the world could with the click of a button read what I was writing if they chose to. So I wanted to make sure I was writing something that meant more than a grade. The overarching effect created an environment that not only felt more purposeful to me when in regards to my writing, but it also drove me to write about the things I was passionate about.

Being able to write about my experiences traveling, or climbing, or dealing with anxiety was new to me, and it’s hard to write about. Having something be personal, but also informative, impactful, and have agency can be difficult, though not impossible. To have my thoughts on the things in my own life be echoed in the minds and voices of those around me, was encouraging to me. I not only wanted to write more about the things in my life, but open up more about them. At the beginning of the course I won’t lie, I felt comfort from writing from a position of more generality, coasting over the things that are more difficult to write about. For me to really sit with these things, and actually write about them, gave me the confidence to know that I’m not bad at writing, my voice just needed to be fed and cultivated. It was there the whole time, I just needed to coax it out. Even though it seemed like writing wasn’t the way for me to find my voice, in reality that was the one thing I needed to do.