My Writing Experience

I’ll call this “Crawl Back In”

Tracing back of my writing experience, I have once been a precocious writer. I loved writing. It was my favourite passtime in primary school. Writing assignment and exam never troubled me. Instead, I took tons of fun in it. One night, which I clearly remembered, at the age of 9, I started writing my first novel. After that, I wrote every singer day for four years before I entered middle school. That was the peak in my writing experience, a time I read most, wrote most, enjoyed writing most, and a time that I dreamed of becoming a writer.

However, I lost this passion. How?

Now as I ponder over when I began to lose interests in writing, I realize that it started when I began to lose freedom in writing. Now this might be different from where you are from, but it was the situation from where I am from. In my country, where a single national exam called Gao-Kao at the end of your senior year determines where you would go for university, the pressure of getting a high mark is overwhelming among students. Teachers no longer teach about writing itself but exam skills. They teach about “A+ template”, which is restrictive in style, topic, and even theme. Most importantly, it should be “politically correct”. Stay only positive and keep silent to the dark side of the society was how we were taught to secure a high mark. Therefore, students began to memorize, copy, and imitate those template. In the end, we all become excellent master of exam skills instead of writing skills.

Under the pressure of college application and protect my exam scores, I wrote what the examiners like instead of what I want to express. While I did secure my score, I did not secure my passion for writing. I gradually lost interest for writing, which is no longer my personal enjoyment but demanding and annoying school assignments that I struggle with. I wrote less, read less, thought less, and enjoyed