To Abandon Writing with Force (WP4)
I have mastered the art of the argumentative essay. Twelve grueling years of public school pummeled the structure and format into my brain, over and over again, netting me a 5 on my AP Lit test and the belief that English is one of my best subjects. I became best friends with staunch formality and learned to look only for the concrete.
Writing had no purpose; I was good at it, sure, but my WHY and BECAUSE were simply to meet a deadline. To analyze for a grade. To fulfill expectations. My audience was my teacher, who would likely glance at it once and never touch it again. It accomplished nothing for me.
I had become a seasoned professional at FORCING audiences to embrace my ideas. To present my concept as the ONLY correct possibility, irrefutable because of my standard THREE body paragraphs, each with exactly TWO in-text citations.
As I mentioned in “To Live Vicariously,” I was obsessed with structure, leaving myself no room for personal reflection. Which is why, for me, this class was so difficult to adapt to during the first couple weeks of the semester. It came as a sort of culture shock. Take this quote from my first-ever Medium post, for instance:
“His usages of literary hyper-casualty such as ‘Lord, lord, lord!’ create a warm, lighthearted atmosphere, one of learning and growth, antithetical to the tone of the deeply ingrained system of oppression he discusses.”
The source in question advocates for embracing cultural and personal dialects in the process of writing, and I examined it like an AP Lit passage, completely ignoring the entire point of the essay. I was so focused on sounding professional to secure a good grade that I neglected the purpose of the writing: to introduce my own personal additions into the discourse space, not to PERSUADE, but to promote self-discovery. To allow my audience to make decisions and find meaning within THEMSELVES through my work, not to instill it within them.
And in the process of discovering the purpose of my writing, I’ve been able to simultaneously undergo my own redefinition. During the latter half of this class, I’ve strayed away from the academic template I’ve become so accustomed to, instead attempting to adopt a more reflective approach, allowing the energy from the topics I’m PASSIONATE about to guide my work. Instead of shoving my ideas into my audience’s face, I’ve begun to choose to offer them up gently, in the hopes that each individual reader will discover their own takeaway.
“To Live Vicariously” describes my new outlook perfectly: “I find fulfillment by acting as a VESSEL of sorts, allowing others to develop their OWN opinions for their own reasons. To hold varying interpretations is to be human; if every experience and message was universal and unchanging, there would be no need to share them at all.”
Writing, especially over this past semester, has single-handedly allowed me to reevaluate and verbalize my position within my own life. None of my essays this semester have been meticulously planned; I’ve made the most profound discoveries about myself DURING the process of composing each article. By the time I looped back around to revise my WP1, I was able to healthily laugh at how much I overcomplicated my own thoughts, and how I sacrificed so much understandability by trying to sound so professional.
Looking back over my work, I notice a considerable decrease in formality over time, as I’ve worked towards letting go of my self-imposed constrictions and instead striving to find a meaningful contribution to the discourse space. By writing for myself AND a wider audience, instead of exclusively writing for a grade, I’ve begun to organize the mental clutter that used to be my identity, focusing on clarity of thought instead of academic jargon.
Breaking free from my fixation with structure has manifested itself in other forms as well. Before this class, I would have never even ENTERTAINED the thought of composing a major project for college about the impact that VIDEO GAMES, of all things, have had on my intellectual development (see: “The Storyteller”).
As I explained in the project: “The concept felt taboo to me: [video games are] generally made out by society to be nothing more than distractions, unhealthily pulling me away from real growth or meaningful learning.”
You see, I was effectively trapped under my own chains: for much of my life, I convinced myself that my only sources of knowledge-seeking were school and theatre. My writing reflected that mentality: for the first several months of this class, the only personal anecdotes I ever brought into my writing were theatre or literature-related. I built a personality for myself that revolved entirely around acting, when in reality, I was EXHAUSTED of rehashing the same “discoveries” I supposedly made over and over again for school projects.
And I kept trying to dig in my heels, instinctively resisting the temptation to discuss other topics. I was a FRACTION of an inch away from archiving an array of characters I’ve portrayed as an actor for my WP2. I tried to autopilot into my comfort zone, as boring as it would’ve been to write. The decision to instead cover video games in relation to my childhood TERRIFIED me, because I just couldn’t understand how I could make it SOUND “worthwhile.”
But choosing story-driven video games as the topic of my WP2 and letting that freedom push me in the right direction for the rest of the semester was, in hindsight, the best choice I could have ever made. Feeling so unshackled for the rest of the semester was a really liberating experience, and I’m very grateful that I gave myself that opportunity.
Learning to embrace passion as a source of self-improvement didn’t come easy to me, but I’ll be able to walk away from this semester incredibly proud of the work I’ve put out there. Especially towards its end, after I abandoned the nagging urge to prove to myself that I BELONGED in a writing class at a prestigious university, I think I really began to find my voice as a writer.
I concluded my introduction to “The Storyteller” with this: “My intellectual identity isn’t exclusive to one label. I am an actor, a video game hobbyist, a conceptual developer. But above all, I want to be a storyteller.”
I think I’ve always known that. Somewhere deep, inwardly. But writing has allowed me to actively recognize and embrace it. It’s allowed me to piece together the fragments of knowledge I previously held about myself into one confident portrayal. And, in my eyes, that’s an incredibly powerful gift to have been given.
Works Cited
Williams, Trevor. “Post I: Writers SHOULD Use They Own English (Within Reason).” Medium, 24 Jan. 2021, https://trevoraw.medium.com/writers-should-use-they-own-english-within-reason-20b7d5134df4.
Williams, Trevor. “The Storyteller.” Medium, 7 Mar. 2021, https://medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/wp2-the-storyteller-af8d5ddbaec8.
Williams, Trevor. “To Live Vicariously.” Medium, 11 Apr. 2021, https://medium.com/writing-150-spring-2021/to-live-vicariously-wp3-2452891e61cb.
