My Storytelling Journey

I’ve chosen this year to participate in the “One Little Word” project with "story" being my focus. Allow me to tell you how I began telling stories….

I fell in love with writing I think in the fifth grade. We did a poem unit or two that year, and it really caught on for me. I started writing about everything. I found my book of “my works” a couple months ago and let’s just say that some are good, but others are not so good…...my grandpa died that year, and writing about him was my outlet. Writing became my outlet for a lot of things after that although I’ve never kept a consistent journal in my entire life (this blog is as close as it gets!).

Writing comes naturally to me. My seventh grade English teacher made sure I knew that I had talent for writing and it was funny (now) how mad he was when I didn’t pass the WASL writing portion by one point. I’ll never forget that conversation in the hallway because the high school kids could see us and were trying to figure out why a friend and I, a couple of “good kids,” were pulled out of class…his anger provided me with the desire to become better even still because I was NOT about to fail that stupid test the next time.

When I entered high school is when things really began to change. I had a few assignments for my freshman English class that were fun and all about storytelling. I loved those! They were enjoyable to get on paper and to make perfect. But, I also joined the Alutant newspaper staff. I took it that first year as an elective class, not knowing how hooked I would become. Again, telling stories of people and the places they had been, those were my favorite to write -- the features. I did quite a few feature stories in my day, and once my teacher figured out my tactic she made sure I stepped out of my comfort zone and did other things too -- a book review, car heap (technically a feature but not something I’d usually do), sports (again, I stuck to things I was familiar with!)....ultimately what she taught me was to trust my gut on how to write things, and then tweak my piece if I needed to.

One of the teachers I give a lot of credit for helping me develop my writing style is my sophomore and junior English teacher. She made me write and rewrite until things were just right…..and she didn’t use red ink! She used green or blue on most things, which I appreciated because I still don’t like red ink from my eighth grade English teacher (he didn’t like my writing style). The prompts that she chose for us challenged me in ways my writing hadn’t been challenged before. To this day I look through and find a few of the pieces I wrote for her classes, my favorite being a character sketch using an adjective as an anchor of the piece. I chose the word “altruistic” for my grandpa and had a wonderful trip down memory lane as I wrote about him.

I reached college confident in my abilities to write papers -- especially the ones where I was writing to tell a story. This happened to be the case with my English 101 class. We were assigned to read “This I Believe” for class, and our final assignment was to write our own “This I Believe” essay. I had absolutely no problem writing that essay because I knew exactly what I believed in…..my 4-H family had helped me navigate and learn quite a bit in the couple of years previously, so I wrote about them. My professor liked it so well that she asked me to read it at SOURCE, an event to recognize student work, that spring. I was honored to be chosen from out of hundreds to read my essay. It remains one of my very favorite things I’ve written.

The art of storytelling is small part natural talent and larger part molding by mentors and advisors. I may have been a natural writer but each of my teachers and editors (because there are many of you!) has helped in guiding me to be the best writer I can possibly be. I’ve realized now how many people have helped me learn to write -- my teachers, the people who are always my editors, and especially any critics because they make me rethink my work yet again.

I’m about to (hopefully) finish writing yet another draft of my capstone project. It’s a tale for another day, but I wouldn’t be about ready to “pound out” the third draft if it weren’t for my writing (and critical reading!) skills. So, if you’ve played a part in any way in my writing education, thank you.

PS - If you haven’t yet read “This I Believe,” read it! It’s a collection of inspiring stories and there are multiple books even :)