Statement - a college essay

I took an Independent Study class through BYU. It was creative writing, I think, though I'm not sure now. Anyways, at the end we had the assignment of writing out a statement and this is what I came up with. (this part written Nov. 2008)

Statement

This course has taught me more about myself and my writing than I thought it would. I have been interested in writing since I figured out I could make people feel things through my words. What a powerful thing to create. I was a sophomore in high school. I’ve been writing ever since, off and on, and it’s all been decent amateur work, but like most amateur writers, I hated my work being critiqued. I felt people were purposely trying to tell me I was doing a bad job, or that I couldn’t cut it. Could I help it if people didn’t have my writing genius?

Shortly before signing up for the class, however, I wrote my first piece that I wanted people’s opinion on. Mainly because I knew I was going to write something that I had never written before and I knew I needed help to pull it off. Looking back, the piece I wrote needs major revisions still, but it was a success for what it needed to be at the time. It was the first time I wrote something for someone else’s eyes besides mine. For someone else’s liking besides mine. And I found I could handle rewriting. I didn’t like it, but I could do it.

Of course, once signing up for the course, it took me a while to get back into that mode of rewriting. The first reason rewriting is hard for me is that I am lazy. I often want work that isn’t perfect (that’s too hard), but good enough. The second reason is what I discussed above—revision is admitting your work isn’t good enough, that the artistic piece I created wasn’t beautiful for what it was.

Then we hit the lessons on revision. And I saw some light. The previous lessons I had taken with a large grain of pepper. What does B.W. Jorgensen have to teach me anyway? But as I started rewriting because I had to, and as the lessons spelled out why I needed to rewrite (mainly to get published some day), I found rewriting to not be as difficult as I assumed it would be. I found myself liking to hear feedback. Throughout the course of the class, I’ve asked about ten people what they thought about my pieces, respectively, as a whole, how I could improve it, any fine-tuning they thought I needed, and so on. That’s about eleven people more than I’ve ever had give me feedback I’d listen to.

So, mainly, through this class I’ve learned that I’m not the fabulous, rough-draft-can-pull-it-off writer I thought I was. And that I can revise things and not sacrifice the art, the piece as a whole, or even particular words or sentences that I really like. I’ve even been given a few suggestions that have turned my whole piece around and made it a better work than the one I originally created.

And I’ve learned I’ve got a lot more work to do.