“Words, Words, Words!” –Hamlet
Spooky Season has come and gone, and November is upon us. For adults, it is a month full of football and prepping for Thanksgiving and Christmas. For us college students, we are readying ourselves for final exams and flying home to be with family and friends for the holidays. However, November is a special month to the writing community, where it’s known as National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo).
Since I am not participating in NaNoWriMo this month, I thought it would be apt to talk about reading and writing and the world of literature. While I am a Political Science major, I’m also an English major, and I want to take this month to focus on that part of me, since I am the person I am today because I read and write.
For those who know me well, they know I am an avid reader. In middle school, I would read during lunchtime, and sometimes I would hide the book underneath the desk if I found class particularly boring that day. But I wasn’t always such an avid reader. In fact, in kindergarten, I hated reading. You practically had to chain me to the couch and glue a book to my hands to get me to read. But everything changed when I switched schools to start first grade.
Everyone remembers their first grade teacher. Mine was Mrs. Carpenter. An elderly lady who took no nonsense from her young students, I found her to be stern but encouraging. To me, she is a miracle worker, a saint. I wouldn’t be where I am today without her. If you went into Mrs. Carpenter’s class without a love of reading, well, too bad, you were going to leave her class with a love of reading.
The first really chapter book series I ever read was the Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne. The series follows brother and sister Jack and Annie as they discover a magic tree house that is essentially a time traveling machine. At first, I hated sitting down with my dad at night and reading. But as time passed, I grew to like it and even look forward to it. Soon, I was reading without my dad beside me or my parents prompting me to. However, I did have an incentive.
Mrs. Carpenter ran a 1000 Minutes Club, where students would try to read 1000 minutes in a month. Whoever made it to 1000 minutes or more would be allowed to get a prize. And I’m not talking about a pencil or something. No, there were board games and dolls and other toys like that. The first couple of months I didn’t know about the club, but eventually I did, and that’s when I really began to read. I distinctly remember wanting to read more than my classmate Austin, since he was the more voracious reader in the class. So, armed with my Mark-My-Time purple bookmark, I would sit on the couch and read in hopes I could get a prize.
Eventually I made it to 1000 minutes. And by the end of the school year, I think I even usurped Austin by having read the most minutes in one month. Without Mrs. Carpenter, some incentives, and my parents, I don’t think I would love reading as much as I do now. And eventually, my love of reading bled into my love of writing.
I always say that my love of writing was discovered in sixth grade, but I think it started in fourth grade. I don’t particularly remember how, but I think the reason I say sixth grade instead is because we did free writing during Language Arts class. Mrs. Strouse would tell us to pull out our composition notebooks and write without stopping for twenty minutes. It was hard, but eventually I started crafting stories. We had a creative writing project at the end of the year, and I loved being able to explore my writing self through a project.
In eighth grade, two large writing assignments we had were a poetry anthology and a fairy tale. This is where I discovered my love of poetry. And the fairy tale assignment jumpstarted what was my first major book idea: a cross between Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella. To this day, I still have the file on my laptop for this project, and I would love to return to this idea eventually.
My biggest writing accomplishment in middle school was during the 2014 NaNoWriMo challenge. I knew I couldn’t write 50,000 words of a novel in a month, so I decided to write thirty short stories, each 1000 words. I based each short story on a song for inspiration. And I did it! I completed my challenge at over 31,000 words for the month. The challenge wasn’t so much about the stories I wrote, but about proving to myself that I could stick to a writing schedule for thirty days straight.
Throughout high school I started several large projects and completed some others. I took a creative writing class and was able to foster my love of poetry. Throughout my sophomore and junior years, I had this idea for a fantasy novel swirling around in my head, and I definitely plan on writing that novel at some point in my life.
However, I was really able to dive into my writing life during my senior year, when I was able to create my own independent study, which I called The Art of the Novel. In the fall, I read most of the books I had collected over the years on the craft of writing. And in the spring, I took the knowledge I had gained from my reading and started on a project that is currently titled ‘All the World’s a Stage.’ During that semester and the following summer, I created an outline for this 80,000-word novel based on four of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Now, as a college student, most of my writing has sadly gone to the backburner. Due to my heavy course loads and attempting to keep a social life, I don’t prioritize my writing. Except for poetry. During the fall semester of my freshman year, I joined the spoken word club here on Hofstra’s campus called SP!T. At the meetings I have attended, I’ve written some of the most personal poetry to date, some of which I share with you!
If I didn’t love reading and writing, I don’t know where I would be right now. It’s such a large part of who I am. I am forever grateful to my teachers and my professors who have poured into me. As a college student, my professional writing is constantly being edited and being bettered, some of which I share with you, too. I don’t know where my love of reading and writing will take me, but I hope it takes me places I never thought possible.