Pulling teeth

I have always viewed writing as something that is boring, something that had to be done in order to make it through school. I could do it, but I never got good grades on my papers unless I first sent them to a few of my friends to edit. Once they had been edited, I usually got A's and B's. I had always viewed this as a writing problem, because it did not come naturally to me. It was something I had to work at, and therefore must be something that I was not very good at.

Then I did my my first Paper Project for Torrey. My mentor wanted me to do one about writing because I struggled with it so much. This goal of this particular project was to help me to appreciate it more, because the assumption was that I wasn't very good at it because I didn't like it. I'm still not sure how successful the project was, but it did help to, at least, dislike writing a little less.

When I did my next paper project, turning the book Jane Eyre into a series of radio drama type dialogues, the most common question I got was "How long did you spend writing this?" My initial writing of each dialogue took about 2 hours, and they were all roughly 5,000 words. Their reaction? "Don't tell your mentor that's all the time you spent on this, but it's really good." Then I wrote a creative paper for the Meta-torrey I took last fall. I never actually got the grade back on that one, but when given to friends, the general consensus was that it was well written, and I got an A in the class. It took me a total of 3 hours to write it, and I had to struggle to limit myself to the 4500 word limit.

So, it seems from experience, that I may not actually be a bad writer, as I previously thought, but there does seem to be a part of me that refuses to do something REALLY WELL if I don't have a vested interest in it.

This was made particularly apparent during the fiction semester of Torrey. All previous semesters, I had done fairly well, but it was really hard for me to connect to the books we were reading. They presented great ideas, and I had thoughts about those ideas, but to put it bluntly, they were boring to me. I did the work because I had to, and learned from it, but not the way I could have if I had been able to truly invest myself in it. When we read the books during the fiction semester, I was not only interested, I LOVED it. The stories, the characters, all of it made sense, and I felt like I was finally connecting on more than just an intellectual level with the reading.

While obviously something that could, and probably should, be worked on, knowing this about myself allows me to acknowledge that I'm not actually a bad writer, or a bad student, I just have to find what truly interests me, and go from there.

All of that being said, I think ignoring jobs that require an above average ability to write is limiting myself to this idea that "I can't." I can, and it's time I proved it to myself, if to no-one else.