Posts Tagged ‘personal essay’

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Nightmares of sentence dissection in grade school or the hemorrhaging of the teacher’s red pen onto a term paper is enough to leave a lasting scar on any student’s literary aspirations.

Many adults who aspire to become published writers have some traumatic memory taunting them right out of their ambitions. For me, it was my freshman year of high school.

Inspired by the words that mapped out the Oedipus Rex and Antigone saga, entranced by the letters that spelled the tragedy of Macbeth, I made a declaration to my class that I wanted to be a writer, but I would need to go to the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor to do so.

Some classmates ignored me, others snickered, and my English teacher explained to me that perhaps set my sights on community college. Agreeing with my teacher, a classmate pointed out that I was not a natural, gifted writer like our other classmate Maytal.

Her words were spoken poetry, even when giving a synopsis of a current event.  At the young age of 14, her words commanded everyone’s attention, forcing everyone to hang from them.

Why couldn’t I write like Maytal? This comparison haunted through my high school years. I adopted new comparisons during my first couple of years at the University of Michigan. I was still being told that I was not a good writer–lacking a command of grammar and constantly misusing words.

Though my love for literature grew deeper, there was no reciprocity in this affair. An avid fan, relentless admirer, I worked so hard to have literature love me. But truthfully, that day never came. And I don’t know if it will.

I spent so many of my writing wonder years convinced I would never be good enough that I ignored the fact that I had been writing all along. Each discouraging word, each awkwardly constructed sentence, each inadequate paragraph, was making me more of a writer. The point is I was writing, albeit badly.

So if you are not convinced that you are a good writer, if you are not convinced that you will ever be published, just keep writing. And as your writing aptitude improves, so will your writing attitude.

As a young child reared on Aesop’s fables casted with animals possessing humanlike characteristics in very human situations, I grew accustomed to seeking the moral of every story. I have always rationalized that if there is no moral, there really is no story.

For the most part, I still think this is true. If a story has no premise from which a lesson can be learned, then the “story” could be considered a rendition of an occurrence or happening.

This is likely another reason I am such a fan of the writing genre, creative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction allows the author certain artistic liberties in relating ‘based on true story’ events.

But perhaps the most important element of creative nonfiction is that in most cases, particularly in personal and radio essays, the stories impart a clearly defined moral. The story carries an important life lesson that readers can easily have and hold.

And if you really think about it, stories are the most effective vehicles that can be used to deliver morals. It is very difficult to prescribe morals without the buoyancy of a descriptive plot or scene to set the stage for its relevancy.

But even with this being said, the stories used to deliver morals are often for naught simply because, if these written or verbal tales where enough, then we would cease to have stories to tell that convey these morals.

In short, morals are not something you simply learn and then live by. Morals are the learnings that result from living. This lends to the old adage that experience is life’s greatest teacher.

So as life lends the greatest gifts to writers and as we joyfully read their tales, we are also getting a clear glimpse of their moral code as designed by life itself.