When I landed a bookstore job my senior year, I made it a goal of mine to read at least a few books in every genre in the store so I could be as well rounded of a reader as I possibly could. It was there that I absolutely fell in love with creative non fiction. If there was any way to sink deeper into love after already landing on my feet, I did with reading. When I discovered the memoirs and essays section; anthologies, biographies social sciences, it was like putting on glasses for the first time. I learned in reading about real people and real lives, stripped to the bone, that storytelling is the most raw and magnetic form of connection. I suddenly found myself drawn to journaling and essay writing. I would have a thought in the middle of the night and instead of writing poem after poem, struggling to find the right stanzas to put the words into, I followed the spiral all the way down until I had pages and pages of essays. I felt as if I'd just had a nutritious meal; full and satisfied. Still, this all remained under my lock and key.
About 2 and a half years ago when I started college, I realized that I would have to share my writing with people. If I was going to commit or writing professionally, I was going to have to share it with people. I accepted that, though I feared it more than anything. My freshman year I took a creative nonfiction essay writing class. I loved that class, and i excelled in it. I loved writing essays and I read them well. One of our first big writing assignments, I had to write a personal essay on the topic of my choosing. This seemed simple to me, and I had quickly learned that in college, everyone has been dragged through the world, picking up quite a few stories along the way. All that to say, I was leaving my fear of sharing my writing behind. The assignment seemed to simple to me. So, in one draft, I wrote an essay about the big, bad, terrible heartbreak I was experiencing at the time.
When I received my grade, I was ecstatic; it was an A. I opened the professor's comments, secretly eager to read the praise. It started off as expected, with compliments on my prose and structure. Then I read a comment that confused me. "I'd like to see you expand more on your descriptions. What did the room look like? What color was the sky outside? What was the weather like..." I didn't get it. Had she not read the very vivid description of the way he lied and the way I tore into myself every day and every night to find more to give him? The way I dreamt about it still and wept about it more? Who cares what the color of his bedroom walls were? I couldn't understand why it needed to be perfect, if I had already put everything I needed to down on paper. It had been perfect in my eyes, and if my writing was sole for my eyes, why did it matter what anyone else thought? What I took was criticism, when what I was given was editing, even if I didn't recognize it in the moment.
I became executive editor of GMU's undergrad literary and arts journal, Volition, the following year. It is one of my proudest achievements to date, my passion and grueling work. I realized in doing though, that I love editing. I love to gather submissions and put together a beautiful and cohesive journal, while promoting diversity and giving people a platform. I loved sending acceptance emails. I love to meet with my peers to make minor edits and strengthen their work. I love being editor I love being in charge and I love taking other people's pieces and putting them together in a beautiful puzzle. Being editor did, however take more time in addition to my classes. 15 credit semesters, a job, executive editor, and president of another organization doesn't leave me with time for much else. Especially time to write. Late night thoughts I used to scribble for hours about in my journals needed to be pushed aside and swallowed, because I had to make our print deadline. I dedicated over a year to editing for other people and writing only for myself or for completion grades in my creative writing class.
Being editor taught me so much about taking pieces to make a whole. I had to think of not only what pieces should make it into the magazine, but also what art pieces would pair well with them. I learned to dissect prose line by line, word by word and whole by whole. What writers were saying was important, but what else was important was the way they said it.
Last semester, I took a poetry writing class. Our professor made us keep a journal in which we wrote about our day. Except, not the main points of our day. She wanted us to write about our senses. The deeply descriptive details of our coffee that morning or the bird we saw outside that night. I made half efforts the first few weeks. Until our first workshop. I wrote a poem about the moment your lover leaves in the morning and you miss them. We weren't allowed to speak in the class while we were being workshopped, only observe and listen. I cringed at most of the interpretations of my poem. Where I had written love and yearning, people had read heartbreak and infidelity. I didn't understand it. I had put it all right there on paper. How did they not get it?
The second workshop this happened, I met with my professor during her office hours. I understood that people would have different interpretations, as we do with all the art. What I didn't understand was why everyone kept asking about the shape of the root of my tree when I was saying look at the forest. My professor said to me, 'Writing is deeply personal, for the reader as much as the writer. You have excellent first drafts. To rewrite doesn't mean you have nothing good. It means you've found a beautiful plot of land, and you need to dig deeper. Put us in the room, if we don't get us yet, put us in the small, the taste, the sound. Make us feel it."
I suddenly understood her journal assignment. To put a reader in my shoes, I need to put them in the room. Where i had good bones and nerves, I needed to have skin and moles, eyelashes and the smell of vanilla. Learning to step back and write about the world was exactly what I wanted to do except I was trying to do it by writing what I felt. When I learned to write what I saw, what I smelled and what I tasted, i learned to really write. I realized, what my professors were saying to me, were mirrored in what I was saying to my writers for Volition. Word for word, line by line and whole for whole. I wasn't just writing for myself anymore. Though it remains carnal and instinctual, writing is not all about making it tangible and locking it away. If I want to write about the world, i must learn to write for the world.
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