I recently found my fifth-grade writing journal. I was reading through it, which was a challenge due to the handwriting, and my stories were pretty crazy. We had to write for thirty minutes at the beginning of class every day. Sometimes we were given a prompt, like write about your favorite thing you did this summer or what would you want our class pet to be. Other times we were just told to write about anything that came to mind. Sometimes I followed the prompt, others I got creative and wrote some amazing things,Other times I clearly wasn't in the mood to write so I would write about how much I didn't want to write. But back then that was okay as long as I wrote for the full thirty minutes.
It is amazing to look back through the stories I wrote back then, some inspired others not quite finished. There were times where you could tell I was excited to tell whatever story I was telling because I wrote for pages. Other times I barely made a paragraph. There was no consistency in length, back then I just let the creative “juices” flow and didn't limit myself with a page limit or requirement. So here is what I have decided to do.
I am going to use my original works, with slight changes to fix spelling and grammar, and publish them in my articles. This way I can share the absolutely amazing and crazy adventures I went on. Back then I didn't focus so much on giving an accurate and exact report on what happened as I was of amazing people with the things I did. So while there is some exaggeration in my stories that is okay because not once did my teacher say it needed to be factual. We just had to write. When I joined the Odyssey I was told that it didn't matter what I wrote about I just had to write, which is exactly what made me think of my writing journal. Since this reminded me of my writing journal I am going to use that. While each story might not be a whole post, I will not give a background on all of the writings. Instead I want my readers to give it their own context. I want people to be able to read them as freely as they were written.
This will hopefully allow me to channel that pre-trained writing. This will hopefully take me back to a time before strict prompts and page limits. I want to write with the idea of writing to entertain. Not to write for a grade, which is what I do now. I have an impossible time of writing without a prompt now because I have been trained to almost depend on that prompt to guide my writing. When I get a paper that doesn't have a prompt or has a very loose prompt, I have a hard time getting started. So I am going back and I am going to work on un-training myself and letting those creative “juices” flow. This way I am able to increase my writing abilities, thus making myself a better writer. This way I don't limit myself anymore.
