As part of my time in college, I took English Composition I and had to write a few essays. Three of them were a major part of my grade. The first essay was the Personal Narrative Essay which was turned in on Sept. 10th. 2014.
I ended up getting a 98 out of 100 on it. The final comment said, "Your essay provides ample everyday imagery and detail to fully address the prompt. Your ideas are complete and engaging. Watch out for sentence fragments and grammar."
Anyways, many people wanted to read it for themselves, so here it is, I hope you enjoy it!
10 September 2014
How Reading and
Writing Showed Me How to Live
Writing has always meant something to me. From a very early age, I created stories and
fantasies in my head, and as I progressed through life, many showed up in some
kind of physical format. Poetry did not
show up in my life until a much later age, but stories…. Fictions, those are the things that have
driven me all my life.
I did not enjoy reading for a very long time. I would pick up a book and it just would not
hold my interest. Tolkien’s stories are
flat and poorly told, Shakespeare is clunky and overly complicated, and
children’s books were written for a more undeveloped mind. Even though I was a child, my brain had
always seemed to crave something more.
I do not know how young I was when I first found the Dragonlance series, by Margaret Weis and
Tracy Hickman, but I vividly remember reading them. Epic fantasy truly grabbed me. I had a friend in high school who had read
them as well, and we bonded over this massive series that continued on forever
as multiple authors took up the series and simply ran the quality into the
ground.
At
that stage in my life, I realized, I was hooked on the idea that there might be
amazing writing out there. Series where
main characters die, drama played out on a grand scale, and betrayal cut deeply
into my soul. Eventually, that same
friend suggested a book series that would change my life.
The Wheel of Time
is a series by Robert Jordan. My parents
bought me the entire series, that had come out so far, for Christmas. From the very first page, my world
changed. I met characters who did not
just exist on page, but within my life.
To this day, the characters are not people I read about in a book, they
are close friends that I experienced so much with. The characters grew up with me. After Robert Jordan’s death, in 2007, the
series was concluded by another author, Brandon Sanderson, who wrote in the foreword
to the first book of the final trilogy, speaking in response to Robert Jordan’s
widow’s request for him to finish the work, “…though when the request was made,
my answer was immediate. I love this
series as I have loved none other, and the characters feel like old, dear
friends from my childhood.”
My
senior year of high school, I woke up; as if I had been a dream my whole
life. For the first time I could see the
world around me and I wanted to participate. I still had yet to write anything of true
meaning to myself, but I had found books to seek my solace in. I fell in love that year, with a woman that
would destroy my heart. I knew she would
ahead of time, but we had a chemistry neither of us could deny.
Friends
surrounded me, from all walks of life, we existed within a ‘cliqueless
clique.’ Jocks, nerds, preps, losers,
and musicians sat at our table. We were
all somehow friends with cheerleaders and teachers. I got to know many of my teachers that year,
talking to them as if they were human beings, even the English teacher who
almost failed me my Freshman year was an interesting person, deep down.
Finally,
I started looking back on my childhood, seeing my writings, seeing the
creativity that came out of me during my mid-teen years as I dabbled in Dungeons and Dragons. I started to really look at the books I was
reading and realized I wanted to try to tell a story, my own story. It was slow going at first, then things
happened to make it stop for a time.
High
school ended for me in the summer of 1994.
That summer was an odd summer for me.
A work program at my dad’s place of employment took me in and I became a
grounds keeper. My first real love
destroyed my heart by pushing everyone she ever knew away and I turned to my
friends for solace. But solace was not
to be had, as the University of Texas in Austin loomed upon a horizon that rushed
towards me at alarming speed.
I
moved into a dorm that had a larger population than my home town, and the city of
Austin itself became the only place in Texas that I would ever enjoy in the
slightest. To say there was a culture
shock would be an understatement. In my
home town, we did not even have MTV, and during the early nineties, teenage
culture was defined by the network. I
was beyond a stranger in a strange land, but I still had books.
The
waits between Robert Jordan’s novels had become too excruciating, so I looked
for something else. I researched the
publishing house Jordan used and found they pretty much specialized in epic
fantasy. And a new author had just come
on the market.
The
cover to Wizard’s First Rule wasn’t
all that impressive, neither was the name of the author, Terry Goodkind. Two things, though, hit me when I first
opened the book. In the Acknowledgments,
the author wrote thanks to “…two very special people, Richard and Kahlan, for
choosing me to tell their story. Their
tears and triumphs have touched my heart.
I will never be the same again.”
He
thanked the main characters, two fictional people, for their story. For the first time I truly understood what
being a real author meant. This touched
me deeply. Then came the first paragraph. To this day, this paragraph speaks to me as
the most vivid and amazingly written first paragraph I’ve ever read. It instantly sucks you into the world he is
writing, making it a tangible place where you get to live.
As
an overall story, the novel is lacking, but what Goodkind loses in originality
and story, he makes up for in emotion. I
have yet to read another novel where I empathize more with the characters. Richard and Kahlan became more than people I
knew, they were people I loved. I fell in
love with them both. When they shed
tears, I did as well. When they
celebrated their triumphs, I found it hard not to cheer out loud. Until Wizard’s
First Rule, I had never openly wept while reading a book, nor had I laughed
out loud.
It
was also the first novel I finished in under a week. I spent days in my dorm tearing through the
text while my life tried to fall apart around me. I was failing college but I was finding a
voice of my own. I contracted love again
while I was writing extremely long, extravagant letters to old friends who were
still in high school, or stuck in the old home town. Those ten to twenty page letters sent
emotions and feelings along with hopes and fears home to people who honestly
cared. One who cared more than anyone else,
one who challenged me more than anyone else….
The
decision to leave college tore at my soul, luckily I had books to comfort me,
along with my own ideas. It might have
been a delusion of grandeur, but I did it.
I left college and started writing.
What followed was the most intense artistic period of my life. Coupled with depression and self-destruction,
I wrote like a man possessed.
All
this led to, the second time in my life, I lost in love. This period was nothing but a lesson that
would teach me the most valuable thing I would ever learn. For well over a year, I was devoting days and
days of hours and hours to writing, and the woman I was courting noticed. She realized I was not a part of society,
draining my parents to chase a dream, and not truly being anyone worth knowing.
She
found love somewhere else, and I went to the book store. I was browsing the aisles when I picked up A Game of Thrones by George RR
Martin. It had just came out in
paperback, and the cover looked interesting.
But across the top was a blurb by Robert Jordan, praising the
novel. The same Robert Jordan that had
opened me up to how good epic fantasy could be.
Before that time, he had never added blurbs to novels, A Game of Thrones was one of the first.
Very
quickly I learned that lesson which would stay with me forever. I learned that art wasn’t true art unless it
was truly inspired. A dream is just a
dream unless you push it through to reality.
The rest of my life waited ahead of me, and I was finally focused on
living it. Less than a month after my
twenty-first birthday, I loaded everything I could into my convertible
(including my hopes and dreams), and escaped my home town. Life is the grandest adventure I could have
ever embarked on, and at twenty-one, it was high time I got after it.
