My life as a teenage writer
I’ve finally scanned the documents from my high school writing days that I mentioned in my previous post. These are by no means the extent of them. What doesn’t appear here are the wonderfully inspirational interviews with writers that were photocopied, spread by spread, from a real live book (do teachers still do that? There’s something charmingly archaic about that imagery), and the short story I submitted in one class. The latter doesn’t appear here because it’s so awful. I spirited it away from my childhood home to read later, and my reaction made my husband think I was being bitten by a small rodent in the other room.
Click on any of these for a larger image.
1) This was a response to a play we’d read in my OAC Writer’s Craft course (a course I passed by the skin of my teeth – it remains my nemesis to this day). I think the first line sounds that way because our teacher asked us to identify what specific style of reaction we’d had, or something, but please look at what I’ve highlighted in the red box:
A well-defined social milieu?! I don’t think I rightly know what that means even now, and I’m nearly 30 years old! Maybe this one phrase is the reason I nearly failed the class. It’s all so clear to me now.
2) The next two were from my CanLit course, the course that pretty much defined me as a writer and showed me how amazing Canadian writing was. Below are notes about Fifth Business, and I don’t know if they’re notes from a lecture or if I invented the wording myself. Either way, it’s amazing to me how deeply we have to delve into books as students. I understand the value in it – and in this case it made me appreciate Fifth Business much more – but I also remember being skeptical that all of these elements were valuable/existed.
3) Now, keeping in mind how much I loved Robertson Davies at this time – how cruel is it to make your class write his obituary? And why did I get such a low mark on it? Probably because I wrote it through tears or something.
4) This one’s my favourite. It’s from that Writer’s Craft course. This document may also be the reason I nearly failed. Look at my answer to the last question! The cheek of it!
5) This last one sums up my high school mentality pretty well.
Category: General