Mother's Influence on Developing My Writing Skills

1608 Words4 Pages

One of my oldest writing memories is narrating my essays to my mother, who would type them for me and help me to correct any grammar mistakes or awkwardly worded passages. To some this may have seemed like a cheating way of doing my essays. I always got excellent grades on them and my teachers praised my writing skills. I used to feel bad, should I tell them that my mom helped me? But looking back, I think that 's what helped me to impro writing skills and learn to love the written word. Part of the reason for having her help me, was that she could type very fast, and as I would dictate my essay, I would have new ideas and she could type them much faster than I could get them on the paper, which helped me to let myself welcome new ideas even …show more content…

I have always loved to read. I will read practically anything. My shelves are full of books. There are books stacked on my desk and the floor of my room. I am running out of room and yet I still collect more and more books. I even have a book about bibliophiles, bibliomanes and those obsessed with books; I believe it is called A Gentle Madness. There is a writing event that takes place in November. It is known as NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. In case you are not familiar with it, the basic idea is that you write fifty thousand words in the month of November. I attempted this in 2013. I was not successful, but I think it really changed the way I looked at writing. Part of my problem in completing the fifty thousand words was my desire to edit as I wrote. One of the main pieces of advice for completing the fifty thousand words is that you just write. Don 't stop to edit, don 't stop to revise, just write. I would type out notes to myself, if I hadn 't named a character yet I would leave something like “FEMALEPROTAGONIST” wherever I wanted the name to appear, that way, when it came time to revise my work, or if I thought of a name I could easily fill in the name wherever it went. Now seeing as I am following the advice above currently and am avoiding revision, this is a bit of a hot mess. But I do have a point in here somewhere. I used to think that a first draft had to be really good. Ithought it had to be basically, …show more content…

I hope to bring it to it 's full potential some day, which is part of the reason why I never finished it. I had a story idea. It was just a small idea, an idea that 's been done before many times. Through the looking glass. Now, it was nothing close to the classic tale we know by the time I had the idea fleshed out, but that was my starting point. I began to write the story when I realized something: I didn 't even know what had set the events of my story in motion. That sort of took me aback. I didn 't even know why the story I was writing was happening, which really was a big oversight on my part. I hadn 't done any background on this whole new world I was creating. So I decided to put that story aside, and write what would become to my story, what The Silmarillion was to The Lord of the Rings. I was brainstorming a literal history book of a world only I knew about, and it was amazing. I had so much freedom. I only wrote a small amount of it. But the planning and the outlines and the brainstorming I did changed me as a writer. I felt so free to make it whatever I wanted, and it was amazing. I haven 't gone back to it because I want to write something else first. I know my first large written work will likely be my worst. We learn from jumping in and making mistakes, and I loved my story too much to make first time novel mistakes on it. I still write down ideas for it when they come to me from time to time,

Open Document