I know, I know, its been like three weeks. I apologize.
Two Saturdays in a row I was on a plane for my Spring Break; last week I was just tired and forgot.
But I'm back.
And still tired.
State testing is upon us, which means that we are busily trying to show our students that the skills they've learned all year are actually the same ones on the test; even though they look completely different. As a teacher, I hate state testing. This is only my second year of teaching, and I hate it. I have far more hope that my students will perform well this year than I did last year, but I still hate it. Those things are not at all an accurate measure of my students and what they are capable of.
But I digress; this blog is supposed to be about writing, not education policies.
I made it a point during my Spring Break to read; one of my layovers was four hours, so I made sure to have a good, thick book with me. I brought the Lord of the Rings trilogy, conveniently all in one book. As I was reading, I remembered why J.R.R. Tolkien was one of my writing inspirations. The words that he used are so vivid, so precise. I can see how he used his knowledge of history to create a new history. Most of my stories take place in different worlds that I've invented, so I understand the need to have a history to give the world an anchor to what the audience already knows and understands.
One day last week, I was driving home from school and was hit with a blast of inspiration, like I hadn't had in years. I came straight in the house and began writing for about 45 minutes straight; at the end, I'd nearly finished a short story. I realized then something that had been absent from my writing preparation: reading! A good writer always reads; I think that my lack of time for reading lately has impacted my writing. We'll have to remedy that.
While grading earlier today and thinking about getting these kids ready for testing, I thought how insufficient one test is to just someone's ability in anything. Some of my kids are masterful writers; however, catch them on a bad day, and you'd think that they couldn't write anything. Even as I compare their writing from the beginning of the year until now, I see how unfair it would be to judge them on work that they did in September compared to now.
By the same token, I can't judge myself on writing that I did when I was just starting as a writer. It's been 14 years (gasp) since I've started writing, and I've only continued to perfect my craft. One of my best friends was helping me to edit the last novel that I completed (back in 2009) and I was constantly cringing and moaning at mistakes I made. My best friend, however, kept telling me "don't forget, you've grown so much since then. Besides that, you have a really solid foundation in this story! You've just got to tighten it up, fine - tune it."
I'm still fine-tuning, I realized. Will it ever be to my satisfaction? Probably not. But as long as I have friends who encourage me, and who realize that sometimes they have to make me stop being so hard on myself, I'll keep growing. And hopefully in the future, others won't just have one piece of work to judge me on.
“Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either.”
― Meg Cabot
