Saturday, February 9, 2019
Personal Narrative: Drafts of my Writing Essay -- Narrative Essay Writ
Failing to mention either the roughly rewarding or the most distressing aspects of learning to write would be to tell an incomplete story. I incur an intimate yet erratic relationship with writing. I am a most ambivalent lover. Stopping to glance at my watch, my fingers muted poised above the keyboard, I have smiled, amazed to find that I have been in a state of bliss in which hours have passed with out(a) my noticing. I have also flushed and sweated as I st atomic number 18d at my computer screen, reading my own text over and over again, vainly trying to anticipate the criticism I correctly supposed would come.I love, adore, am devoted to, am crazy about writing. The limitations of words are nowhere more apparent that when I try to describe my pleasure, joy, delight, enjoyment at using, playing with, relishing, wielding them.I know about writing well, the legality is that I sometimes know how to write. How it is that I know how to write is something I dont know a lot about. I am a creative writer and a formal essayist. I am humorous and deadly serious, courageous and terrified. I write fiction and essay, song and prose. That makes me the teller of lies and truths and, perhaps occasionally, a bit of Truth. But I am fragile, so fragile.I sewer write when approval is heaped on me, shape like blankets give me flannel, cotton, polyester blends, wool and down. Regardless of their weight or numbers, they never smother me or weigh me down. In truth, they barely keep out the drafts. I am delicious to be able to report that I have been wrapped tightly in such comforters as earnest point . . . very impressive work . . . excellent . . . outstanding job. really good essay, with clarity and insight. A strong paper, certainly no... ...I am grateful to her for saying them.Second, I attended the International Womens Writing monastic orders Summer Conference last month at Skidmore College. Eunice Scarfe, a Canadian short story writer who teaches at the Un iversity of Alberta taught a workshop that I was drawn to attend each day. She called free writing the feat of writing, and then described the editing and crafting that follow as the art of writing. That phrasal idiom brought a dignity to what had sometimes seemed to be embarrassingly numerous rewrites. It allows me a little shelter from the cold drafts that always threaten.Last, despite the uncertainty I feel about this relationship, despite my anxiety and my loves legion(predicate) warts, complexities and annoying habits, I tuck the blanket around the two of us. I am conflicted, but still in love and something that I cant quite name keeps me coming back for more.
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