Overall Thoughts on Four Years of Writing

Four years is a long time. In these four years of writer's workshop I can't say that I have learned anything significant in writing pieces. I did learn how to write poems pretty well, but no big epiphanies occurred for me through these four years. What I did learn though, was a bunch of little things that allowed me to improve my overall writing. Learning how to develop a character was probably the most important of these little things I learned. This helps because every story is going to have at least one character, and better characters translate to better stories. Learning how to use suspense to its fullest effect has also helped me improve my writing, as it keeps the reader more interested in a story. I've also learned to look at my sentence structures and shorten some of them up, because I write a lot of run-ons. Applying these improvements, as well as other little one that maybe I don't even notice, to my writing are the reason I am much better today than when I started four years ago.

The greatest catalyst of my growth is definitely all of the conferences I've had. The reason I write the way I do is because I think it sounds good. Most of the time it has to take a peer or a teacher to notice errors in my writing for me to actually see them. Because if I saw my mistakes on my own, wouldn't I not even write them? So it is mainly from the help of others that my writing has improved. Another catalyst may be that I've tried experimenting with writing styles. I think that opening myself of to different types of writing has let me try new things and learn new ways to write.

I've had some struggles over these four years too. Specifically, attempting to make my dialogue as realistic as possible in one of my pieces Senior year was a big struggle. Another part of writing that is tough for me is not writing many run-on sentences; I tend to put lots of commas in my writing. Finally, the biggest thing I struggle with, and this has occurred constantly over four years, is the inability to come up with ideas. I can't tell you how many times I'll sit at my computer for at least an hour and end up with nothing on the page. Grammar can also be pretty tough for me. I'm probably forgetting a few things, but other than that, I haven't had any other problems.

In the future, I'm going to focus mainly on continuing to try new things in my writing. If I keep doing the same stuff, I'm going to get bored with it. I also will want to continue to work on my character development. I've come a long way since Freshman year, but I think that there still is some improvements that need to be made. I'm not what else I'll be working on, but hopefully my writing will keep improving.