Reflections

 Reflections on what you do as a writer, what is most valuable to you, and what you have been "taught"; and what you haven't.

As a writer, I tend to perform more creative, self-assigned tasks outside of the academic world.  I free-write at least 2-3 pages each day, and either work on my manuscripts or manage pre-writing tasks related to them like world-building or character development.  If I can't manage that, I default to play-by-post roleplaying on forums, or to my Daily Writer prompts.  I always try and have something to do because if I find if I don't write on some level every day, I'm more likely to become depressed and go into weeks-long creative ruts.  the act of writing itself is very valuable to me.

What is almost important to me as a writer is feedback and criticism.  I'm not going to say that I have a thick skin and can take harsh criticism, because it's still my writing and on some level I'm attached to it.  But I am realistic and have learned to be honest about my skills.  If something I write isn't up to my usual par I likely know it already and I want to see what went wrong from someone else's perspective because I know I might be too close to see the specifics.  What I find most valuable are people responding to my writing with questions rather than statements.  And at the end, if I don't find others' suggestions feasible to me--even if it was helpful--I reserve the authority to keep what I have or build off the ideas to find my own solutions.  I guess collaboration, even for my solitary projects, are key to me.

In the academic world, I was taught first to copy sentences from workbooks, and to copy words from the dictionary and use them in sentences.  We had workbooks where we had to determine grammatically correct sentences from incorrect, and the unspoken understand was that we emulate that pattern.  We also learned how to write in cursive format, and had to copy sentences from books in cursive.  This was the norm for a long time heading up into high school--copy and paste, no real thoughts of our own.  We were to find the 'right' answers.

In high school this continued, but towards the goals of completing our standardized testing and SATs.  Listen and repeat became the game, but now we had to listen and then repeat the same information in a way that had not been said before.  Paraphrasing was the ideal to reach.  Once again, our own opinions were not important.  Everything we could think of had been thought of before, and if we thought of something new we were wrong.  

I wasn't taught how to form my own opinions in my writing until well after it should have been too late, but I had long since been doing it on my own through journaling, pseudo-anonymous forum posting, etc.  I couldn't NOT have an opinion on the world or its aspects, even if I wasn't asked for it.  At the same time, because of personal trauma (my father reading through my diaries and confronting me about the content) this sort of writing was very personal to me and I expressed it privately or anonymously.   It was a long time before I was able to learn how to insert it into my academic writing in a way that would make my content original and please my professors, but also please myself without suffering anxiety of being persecuted for my thoughts.  That was a process I went through on my own--classroom composition wasn't really a factor.

Freshman composition did teach me the values of revising--of being close to your work and caring about it, and thus not simply stopping at the first draft and parting with it.