Where Do I Go from Here?

I often hear my peers complaining about academic essays. They think they are stifling, adhere to a strict set of rules and guidelines where one bifurcates an argument and chooses one side to support while creative writing is all about description and storytelling. There is no use, however, in thinking traditional, academic essays and creative writing as two separate entities. Academic writing and creative writing assignments are designed to teach different skills, and it is up to each individual person to experiment and mesh the things he learns from each genre into his own writing style.

I knew this before I walked into my first English class as a freshman in college; however, I had not been able to stop myself from dissociating my academic writing from any other form of my writing. I had a very distinct style to my academic writing, and I found myself very hard-pressed to use first person and specificity in regards to my personal experiences. I have no qualms against talking about myself and my personal experiences, but knowing that my writing was for class created a mental block that I struggled to climb—I felt like my writing had to be strictly academic, and once divulging in personal experiences, I was simply having a casual conversation. As a written communicator, I felt as though my academic writing had snuck its way into my other writing styles, but the converse was not true.  

I spent the first half of the course focusing on rectifying the disconnect between my writing styles in personal narratives, be it style or specificity. By the end of my revision and reflection process, I had successfully managed to make my essays personal and tell my story. Academic papers did not simply need to be a strictly logical argument in a claim-evidence-warrant format; they could utilize stories.

 By the end of the first process, I found myself asking ‘Where do I go from here?’ Naturally, with my wordiness, the next step in my writing process is to execute more concision. Thinking about the remainder of the quarter, I wondered how I would go about eradicating what others considered redundancy in my writing and thought. What exactly did others consider redundant when I required thoroughness to connect my thoughts? I questioned if I could even consider the validity of others’ opinions when my peers missed or complained about my deliberate stylistic choices while those who were more experienced caught on quickly and expressed positivity toward them.

In the end, I have yet to focus specifically on concision. Upon reflecting on my writings in the second half of the course, the majority of what even considered revisable focused on specific techniques in writing. Craft a two-hundred word sentence. Write a piece using only six words per sentence. Craft an extended metaphor. What connected my pieces were my use of characters and storytelling to achieve these techniques.

Of the three assignments, the only one that most directly challenged my wordiness was “Indefinite AFK,” a story created by a string of six-word sentences. By limiting myself to six words per sentence, I had little room for stylistic embellishments. Instead, I was forced to embrace short sentences and fragments to convey the story I wished to tell. There is still repetition and rhythm when reading, but I had to learn to make do without the long strings of descriptors or the syntactical modeling that I am often attached to. To embellish and expand “Indefinite AFK,” I drew upon my own experiences with my friends and centralized the characterization on a hobby that I have: role-playing.

“Up the Slope” and “Forward” draw on my previously addressed obsession with Yowamushi Pedal (see: My Affection) and my love for role-play. “Up the Slope” was originally crafted as a two-hundred word sentence describing the main character of the series; however, text walls are painful to read, and my writing was stiff and forced. When revising it, I reorganized the structure and built a story—albeit reminiscent of the form of a summary—and instead of writing a single two-hundred word sentence, used the techniques to vary sentence length throughout. I challenged myself to keep one sentence substantially longer than others, totaling one-hundred and thirty words. “Forward,” however, is written as I would write a short story, or a novel, with the goal of the structure modeling an extended metaphor.

Concision continues to be a hobgoblin that I need to address; however, my priorities fall to stylistic exploration and interest in writing. It is necessary for each person to have multiple styles, approaching different forms of writing in various ways, but it is also important for me to blur the lines that I have created for myself in efforts to smuggle my personality and interests into my writing. As an artist, especially, storytelling techniques and varieties capture my attention first and foremost, especially when allowed to dictate my own direction and progress.