“You all have a five page paper due Monday.”  I vividly remember hearing these words spoken by my sophomore English teacher, Mrs. Maciag, about once a week.  I remember everything about that class; my seat, second column, second to the back, next to my friend Tommy.  The room always smelled like the same flowery air freshener.  We would all be on our school uniforms; white oxford shirt, sweater, black pants and shoes, and a tie, which usually was choking me half to death.  At these words I would look around at my classmates and knew that we were all thinking the same thing.  We were all going to spend our Sunday night writing this paper, not really caring much what we put on it, just trying to get by and get the grade.

I also remember how she would always limit the way we would write somehow, such as making us use every sentence starter and dress-up style in every paragraph or page.  I definitely did not like writing my papers like that.  It seemed completely backwards to me to assign a creating writing assignment and then place limits on our creativity.  The only creativity that came out of it was the ridiculously creative ways I managed to shove all of those sentence starters and dress-ups into one page, which often caused my writing to make almost no sense.  Granted, I’ll admit, those did come in handy on my SATs helping me get a good grade on my essay.  Despite this I am rarely satisfied with my writing when I am forced to use them.  Through this I became a very proficient school writer, but not a real writer.  Keeping in mind writing isn’t something I have always dreamed of doing.  As a child I kept a journal, several actually, never really getting very far with them, writing in them maybe once a month or so.  I never really thought much in my life was exciting enough to write down.  But, it’s still

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something I enjoyed, before it was something that would mean the difference between an A or an F in a class.

As I said before, I wish I could have put a little more of myself into those papers, instead of writing to appease a teacher.  If I could just write what she wanted me to write, what was the point of putting in the effort anyway?  I could write papers with ease just following the instructions; if it was historical just get the facts, be affluent in the way you say it, and that’s that.  I think most students experience this; unless you are in some kind of creative writing class, so I am not trying to complain.  But this paper is the first thing I have written in years that I didn’t have specific guidelines on how to write it.  Just writing about my experiences, actually letting my thoughts out, something I did not experience too often.

The last time I was told to write something truly creative with no prior guidelines was in eighth grade.  The assignment was we had a month to write a novel.  Not an edited amazing novel keep in mind, they didn’t expect that out of a bunch of eighth graders, the only requirement was that it be at least twenty thousand words.  I wrote about thirty five thousand.  Now for the life of me I cannot remember exactly what it was about, but I remember just spending hours in class and at home just writing whatever came into my head.  I remember not caring about the aching in my hand and my head as I frantically wrote.  New plots, characters, twists and turns, relentlessly flowing from my head onto the paper.  No matter what the idea was I would write it down, even if it didn’t necessarily make sense; it didn’t matter, I was

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writing what I wanted to.  I wasn’t being graded for quality (thank God), or grammar or any of that, but for the fact that I just wrote what I wanted to write.

That’s what real writing is all about.  Like Stephen King said, writing is a form of telepathy; what is the point in doing it if it’s not even your own thoughts being written down?  What would the untrained observer be able to derive about you and your thoughts from the writing?  There’s a reason I never forgot doing that assignment.  Because like I said before, it allowed me freedom in my writing.  It’s a completely different feeling sitting there writing for yourself, than it is sitting at your desk at ten o’clock on a Sunday night, half awake, trying to figure out what in the world the teacher wants you to do.   I managed to get an A in the class, with nothing I had written being worth anything to me.  I now intend to put that kind of thoughtless, soulless writing behind me and put myself into everything I write.