About Me
What Motivates Me to Create?
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I was a bossy kid. As the oldest of three girls, there wasn’t much my younger sisters could do when I told them they would be acting in my hot-off-the-press play about a princess stuck up in her castle (an old tent my parents had set up in the basement). Reading from scripts printed in purple-hued, Comic Sans type, they staged my first and last major production.
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It became clear to me that the tedious nature of staging came far second to the act of writing itself. I could lose myself in writing, stepping outside my world and walking into another. In my middle-school stories, I had fire powers, and when I went through my Greek mythology phase, I was a daughter of Artemis––bow and arrow in hand.
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The universes of my stories were carefully crafted, at first made up of copycat words from young adult novels and then exploding with color and detail when I discovered the thesaurus. With a new arsenal of words and experiences, my writing became not only an important tool throughout high school and into college, but further, it transformed in its purpose.
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The more practice I had writing argumentative essays, the more I realized the importance of getting the reader to believe in my writing. Not only did this realization lead to scores of impassioned theses, but it changed my descriptive style as well. I began to paint more vivid pictures of scenes I’d always loved: the sleepy fog that settles on the lake in the mornings before the sun has broken the horizon, the soul-sick feeling of leaving something behind as I watch from the plane window as Minneapolis disappears below me, and the wild contentedness of sitting shotgun in my dad’s car with the windows down as AC/DC reverberates in my bones. I began to realize the value of getting the reader to feel my writing––to make it tangible.
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Although these days I don’t spend quite as much time writing creatively, I find that this new development in my style permeates all of the writing I do. It’s because of this belief that even the driest paper I’ve written so far (about traffic-ticketing rates in Tacoma, Washington) has presented me with the opportunity to craft a cohesive and compelling message that captures my reader. As I pull words from the air and arrange them in neat lines between invisible margin walls, I am again that daughter of Artemis, surveying my dominion.