Introductions and Pen-troductions

Hello! My name is Sydny and I'm a high school student who has finally decided to share my passion for writing with the world.





I was first introduced to the concept of writing as being less of a menial task and more of a creative (even profitable!) hobby in grade school. While I sometimes struggled with math and even the sciences I wanted to pursue as a career, reading was always easy. Almost too easy. As per requisite for every school, I was the nerdy kid who spent her mornings in the library and racked up an embarrassing number of AR points ("accelerated reading" to those who never had to endure the bloody competition of reading books just for the sake of taking little tests and getting AR points: a public school Hunger Games). For someone so enamored with the printed word, I never found much interest in writing until, get this, I was introduced to the quotation mark.

In my third grade class, we were distributed small, stapled packets of paper every few days for writing assignments. I didn't know it at the time, but I had gleaned some impressive words from the books I gobbled down daily, which made my writing shine a little more. My teacher, surprised that I was able to write complex sentences already, suggested I include dialogue. I had been reading dialogue for some five years, but didn't know it had a name. She taught me how to enclose speech in quotation marks, which opened some mental door that had been locked tight by ignorance. I realized I could write just like my favorite authors. In short, I realized I could write.

I didn't start churning out Shakespeare, of course: I'd probably be much further along if my first stabs at fiction were as florid and beautiful. Instead, I filled spiral-ring notebooks (bought from the School Store every Friday for a whopping fifty cents) with stories and doodles. They were never very good, but I wrote constantly and never stopped writing. The discovery of writing had felled some dam inside of me, had piqued some hunger that couldn't be satiated. At first, I thought it was just the relief of some pent-up desire to write that had been compromised for so long by the thought that it wasn't possible. It wasn't until middle school that I realized what writing really meant to me.

For a long time, I was a very antisocial child. As mentioned above, I found solace in books as a child and had difficulty socializing. I blossomed from a quiet child to an awkward preteen who was eternally adjusting her personality to fit the demands of "friends". The story has a happy ending: I've shed that awkwardness and accumulated a wide circle of friends who love me for who I am. But during those frustrating days, isolation was a preferable alternative to friendship and in that solitude, I had writing. Writing that required no talking on the spot, no physical grace: if I stuttered in my writing, I merely had to grab my eraser or punch the backspace key. You had the opportunity to edit what you wrote before it could be criticized. And, of course, created characters would never, ever find you awkward or off-putting: they idolized you for creating them.

This was massively appealing for a girl like me.

In the end though, writing is more than a haven. It's an outlet. It's a weapon. It's an extended olive branch. We live in a world dominated by writing, be it through e-mails or magazines or novels or the equally important tweets and posts and updates commanding our attention. For some, it's anathema; for others, it's a passion; for still others, it's a way of living. I'm not expecting my future to align itself to Stephen King's (however much I'd like to write for a living and actually earn enough to live comfortably, the odds are slim), but with a tool like writing at my disposal, I can have my cake and eat it too.

Think about it. Writing determines one's future. College essays. Resumes. Standardized tests. Something as simple as a working knowledge of sentence structures and a few SAT vocabulary words can turn a simple idea or plea into a scintillating piece of work. And that, my friends, is worth a little labor in English class and some writing exercises.

Writing is a passion to me. And just like the dancer who can't help but stand en pointe at the bus stop or the painter whose hand itches to adorn the blank alleyways outside their window, I am driven to share my passion. Hopefully, we'll meet again for next week's post: until then, find your own quotation mark. It may be the key that opens the mental door and tears down the dam.