Introduction
Even as a child, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I read books voraciously and even tried writing my own, scribbling superhero stories onto staple-bound college rule. However, I lost that passion in middle school after a particularly brutal English class project which required that we read and report on some absurd number of books. I lost my appetite for reading which consequently killed my drive to write.
By the end of eighth grade, I was so apathetic about English class and school in general that I could hardly tell a noun from a verb. I managed to make it through middle school, but I knew my poor grammar skills would be eaten up by the tornado that lurked on the horizon of 9th grade. Her name was Mrs. Westbrook.
Tales of her classes haunted the halls of my tiny, Christian school — the papers, tests and readings were said to be bad, but they were nothing compared to what people said about Mrs. Westbrook herself. She was ill-tempered, incendiary; she was brooding and maniacal. She was an English teacher summoned straight from the pages of Revelation.
So, the summer of 2015 saw me studying my grammar. And while all this studying did not go without merit, I would soon find that the fear that fueled my studies was baseless, as where I expected to find a dictionary-thumping devil, I found a sage with a silver tongue for grammar. Every conjugation and punctuation, every tense and compositional rule that I had been drilling into my head against all summer suddenly made sense at her word. She made it all seem so simple.
She encouraged me greatly to put everything I had into my writing. While I couldn’t disagree more with my classmates’ general opinion of Mrs. Westbrook, I do understand where they are coming from. She was a tough teacher and when she gave feedback on our writing, she didn’t try to lie or sugar-coat anything. So whenever she would applaud my work, I knew she was being genuine.
I remember once we partnered up with a classmate to edit one another’s papers and Mrs. Westbrook asked who my partner was. I told her it was my friend Alex and she looked at Alex and told him that he was in great hands. It was little moments like that would push me forward and keep me interested in writing beyond 9th grade.
I started reading books again, though I replaced Percy Jackson and the Hardy Boys with Dorian Gray and Raskolnikov. This rejuvenation in my literary interests re-sparked the idea of becoming a novelist. Through the remainder of high school, I focused a lot on my style in all of my writing assignments, however, I still hadn’t tried my hand at writing anything besides research papers. That wouldn’t change until college…