Better Living Through Composition: A Literacy Narrative

I don't think I ever really liked reading or writing until I was told I was good at it. I believe this was in the fourth grade, when Mrs. Krippendorf told me I could be a funny Steven King. Most of my memories of reading and writing before this amount to nothing but both physical and psychological pain. I was a fairly neurotic child and, as of now, a fairly neurotic adult. I often needed validation from outside sources in order to feel good about things. I'm not saying this because I want sympathy; I'm saying this because it is key to understanding why I began to love writing in the first place. 

I don't remember much of my childhood, but I do remember key moments in learning the skills to read and write. I went to Catholic school, and was therefore taught how to create cursive letters through nuns. I should point out that most nuns do get a bad reputation for simply being nuns, but their work ethic can bring about things such as cramps and the inability to hold a pen correctly after a certain amount of time. This was worsened by my dexterity condition; I never crawled properly as a baby and just started walking really early, resulting in me now having the dexterity of a baby giraffe learning to walk. My cursive lessons did not go well.

These lessons are obviously not how I ended up pursuing a career in writing. I remember Mrs. Krippendorf complimenting for a reason. For the first time outside of kindergarten, I was actually having fun in school. She gave me the complete freedom to write about whatever went on in my head. This, for me, was the point where the act of "writing" was no longer about how nice and neat my handwriting was or being under extreme pressure to keep all of my letters lined up with the dotted line on that horrible yellow tracing paper we always used. It turned into coming up with ideas, telling stories, and entertaining people. It was amazingly effective in making me actually enjoy one aspect of school, as I was barely scraping by in my math and science courses. I had little to no interest in multiplying or blood cells, and while I found my history and religion courses easy, I didn't do much in those besides memorize facts. I wonder, however, exactly how my writing got good enough for people to start taking notice.

If I had been a well read child, I'm sure that would be easier to figure out. However, I wasn't—at least in the traditional sense—fond of reading books as a kid. In fact, I didn't start heavily reading until my early teens. I did, on the other hand, read a cornucopia of magazines and comic books. While this is an extremely nerdy thing to admit, most of my vocabulary came from reading such publications as Astonishing X-Men and Electronic Gaming Monthly. The strange thing was I apparently could read well. My father always tells me of the time I was the first to finish a book out of the entire class in some book club program. Supposedly for someone so young, this was some sort of feat. To this day he still talks about it, and I still have no idea what he’s talking about.

It almost makes one wonder if literacy is something innate, then, because it seems I was good at both reading and writing "just because." I doubt that is the case, though. I think I was privileged, in a way, to be going to the school I was attending. While the Catholic bits didn’t really rub off on me in any lasting way, the teaching was fairly advanced for elementary and junior high students. Perhaps literacy is a culture thing, and I was lucky enough to be in the group that learned the ins and outs of it well. I don’t have my own personal definition of literacy, to be completely honest, but I do know it was something I was afraid of losing at one point in my life. High school was a bit of a mess for me, and I ended up dropping out. This put my already paranoid mind in an even worse paranoid state. If I wasn’t reading and writing like I usually do, would I just get worse at those abilities? Even worse, what if I just flat out lost them? I didn’t take much time to think about it, as my time off from school was spent primarily doing the aforementioned heavy reading I missed out on a kid. I stopped writing for myself and took a more journalistic approach, getting published on some websites. While I easily able to pass the GED testing, I still wondered how someone like me would get by in college, and if my writing would even matter at that point.

What surprised me the most about writing in college was that nothing in those three years of high school applied in the very least. In a way, I feel like I’m almost lucky to have lost another year of learning how to write “correctly” for standardized testing. Most creative writing in high school was pushed aside for the lessons of how to write essays and summaries to get good grades. Gone were the days of having a good idea and actually doing something with it. My first years in college encouraged putting ideas that may have seemed “out there” or “insane” into whatever I was writing a paper about. I was lucky enough to have had professors that put concept high on their grading rubric. Still, I wasn’t writing actual stories; something I really missed from the days of Mrs. Krippendorf. I felt a writer’s block coming on, and decided to join the student newspaper. Much to my surprise, they made me the editor in chief within a week. I still don’t know how this happened. Perhaps they were understaffed.

I enjoyed my time with the paper, as it once again gave me a sense of validation. I was producing something that at least someone was reading. It was nice to see my name on an actual printed product and not some lame website. I was mainly writing film, music, and video game reviews with a sprinkling of politics when nobody else wanted to do it. While I enjoy writing about these things, there was still not outlet (aside from our April fool’s issues) for creativity. I tried my best to make some of my reviews almost incomprehensible in some pretentious (read: regrettable) new-journalism sort of way, but I felt my days of writing anything fictional was over, and I just took that as a sad fact of life. I figured perhaps the writing genre was not for me, but I could use my literacy skills in other things. I started majoring in psychology, thinking that my writing could take me a long ways in the field

I was wrong. Really, really wrong. At first, yes, I was writing up responses and ideas about theories and studies in which I had some freedom to throw in “writerly” aspects. As time goes on, however, psychology became less about analyzing and more about doing. I remember the moment I no longer wanted to be a psychology student: my professor told me to write worse. I couldn’t comprehend it, and actually talked to a therapist I know about it. He told me how most reports in the field are written on a third grade level, so those more oriented with science could easily grasp what was being said. Even though I put two colleges worth of time and effort into psychology, I wasn't doing what I liked.

I'm at my third college now, and as of the fall of 2009, I am once again an English major, focusing on writing. I've slowly worked my way back into my old creative ways and have so far written a script and some material for what could someday be a book, or, at the very least, one really strange memoir piece. My relationship with writing has been a strange one, like something out of the stages of grief: hating it, loving it, missing it, dismissing it, and then finally accepting it. I feel like I have come full circle, though. All my focus now is on writing, and learning once again how to let the silly ideas flow onto the paper instead of just writing some research paper. In some weird way, finally choosing to write is me giving myself validation. It only took three colleges to figure out how.