Me as a Writer

My Autobiography as a Writer

By Alec Wakefield

            Deciding when I first started writing may depend on what you consider writing. Like almost all kids I learned how to draw letters, string together basic words in kindergarten, and even construct easy sentences. But it was not until early grade school that I could create a story in my head and put it in words on paper. So it depends if you think writing is creating words, or stories that decides when I started writing.

            Most of the writing I did in first grade that I can remember was non-fiction, although I’m not sure if that is the best description of it. We used to keep journals that we would use to record what we did over the weekend, and I managed to find mine. Most of my journal entries consisted of misspelled words and poorly drawn pictures, and were probably the first stories I ever wrote. At this point in my writing, I did not know how to come up with my own story line in my head which is required to write fiction.

 The first time I remember writing fiction was in third grade with my teacher Mr. Stimler. Mr. Stimler was one of the most influential people for me as a writer, because he was the first teacher who ever encouraged me to write fiction. Writing fiction was very interesting to me at the time, and this is one of the only times in my life that I wrote for fun. I would start a story in class, then bring it home and continue it and ask Mr. Stimler to read it for me. Most of the writing I did at the time was similar to whatever I had read recently, so some of my stories were not very original, but still helped me come to like writing.

The most important part of fourth and fifth grade for me was the introduction of research papers. It started with writing a paper about a state in fourth grade, and the writing a research paper about parasites the next year in fifth grade. For the first time we had to take notes form our sources, and put them together in to a paper. Research papers are still one my least favorite forms of writing because they are so much more time consuming than writing a story about yourself or one you made up. We continued to write fiction during these years, but the research papers were the most notable change.

            Sixth grade was another important year for me as a writer, partly because research papers and projects became not only part of writing/reading class, but also part of history class. In sixth grade we did a project called history day, which is a national competition of history projects and was also part of our grade. This was the first research project that I enjoyed making, and changed my outlook on research papers. It made me realize they were much more enjoyable if you pick a topic you are interested in before the assignment.

            Seventh and eighth grade were not hugely important in my writing, and were more important for reading. We read short stories and novels instead of writing as much. One significant thing that happened to me as a writer in eighth grade was when we blogged about stories that we read. Blogging about the books taught me to reflect on stories I had read, and think about them in different ways. It helped me view stories and events from many different perspectives.