I Suck at Writing Now
I have always considered myself to be a decent writer. Not good enough to write a novel, but not bad either. My sister has always been the far more talented one, in terms of writing, so I had always preferred to help edit her work and correct her grammar. Even though I am a bit of a grammar queen, I still consider English to be my weakest subject. I have always had to try hard to be good at English, and writing, in particular.
In November 2011, my sister encouraged me to participate in National Novel Writing Month AKA NaNoWriMo. The goal was to write fifty-thousand words in one month for a novel. She had been a participant for years and she credited her polished writing skills to the annual event. She told me that if I did it, my writing would definitely improve.
So I tried it out. And I struggled. Years of editing my sister’s work was an unexpected disadvantage for this challenge — I kept having this compulsive need to edit my work every day and that would set back my word count. In order to meet that daily 1,667 word count goal, I had to ignore every instinct to edit, and instead, just write, even if what I had written was horrible.
At one point, I didn’t write for a week. I had given up. Who had the time to write when I had homework to do, essays to write, and textbooks to study? All those things seem trivial now, but at the time, these tasks weighed heavily on my mind. But my sister kept encouraging me to write and to not give up. So I picked it back up again and by November 30th, I had met the fifty thousand word count goal.
After editing what I had written for NaNoWriMo 2011, I realized that what I had written was complete and utter garbage, so I scrapped my novel. But my sister had been right: my writing did get better over the course of a month. The first ten thousand words were downright painful to read, but the last five thousand were somewhat bearable.
From that point on, I continued to write on a regular basis, either for weekly written assignments for English or for my own personal reasons. I participated in NaNoWriMo 2012 and surpassed sixty thousand words. While I ended up scrapping that novel too, the benefits of daily writing and two rounds of NaNoWriMo were evident: writing came more easily to me than it had ever done before, and my writing had vastly improved over the course of two years.
When I matriculated into university, I was only required to take three seminar classes for my GE’s. So while I did have the occasional writing assignment or essay, the majority of the classes were focused on discussing ethics, social issues, and the like. I found that I didn’t have to try very hard to do well in these seminar classes either. I could write an essay the night before it was due and still get an A on it. Needless to say, the writing standards in these classes was much lower than what was expected of me in senior year AP English class.
I was also overwhelmed by my major courses, so I didn’t participate in NaNoWriMo either. The same thing happened last year. I didn’t even think about participating in NaNoWriMo this year either.
The combination of lowered writing standards in my seminar classes, lack of writing assignments in general (you don’t do much writing as a biology major), and a lack of participation in NaNoWriMo has made my writing skills atrophy. In other words, I suck at writing now. I recently read my senior year essays and needless to say, they were so much better than the last paper I had to write for my last seminar class. It’s almost painful how bad my writing has become.
This is where Medium comes in. I want (and to be quite honest, need) an outlet to cultivate my writing past the level it used to be in my senior year of high school. I’m much too late to write for NaNo 2015 — I don’t even have a chance at getting to 25,000 words. Most people would probably wait until the new year to turn over a new leaf, but I figured, there’s no better time than the present to fix a problem. And honestly, I have a problem with the current state of my writing.
So here’s hoping that I keep up with writing on Medium semi-consistently. I want to write on topics that are relevant and important to me while slowly improving my writing. Hopefully, other people will find the topics I write about interesting and helpful as well. By this time next year, the plan is to participate in NaNo again and actually complete a novel. Maybe. Fingers crossed.
