The irony of being a writer is choosing to define yourself by a fundamental and necessary societal skill. To call oneself a “talker” is much more of a personality descriptor. What if I called myself a breather? Does that mean that I can breathe better than you, or make you less equipped at breathing? The point here is that it can feel pretty self-assuming to wake up one day and call yourself a writer. How good do you have to be? What level of professionalism must you achieve? How can we even agree on a definition of good writing? This internal banter prevented me from calling myself a writer for nearly 20 years. As a 22 year old senior in college, I have finally come to claim my title through the realization of my journey. But what exactly made me a writer? I can point to a series of milestones that led me towards this identity:

 

1. The typewriter, literally…I am a millennial, yes. But my first experience with writing came on an old-school typewriter. Around the year 2000, my mom took me to her work in the surgeon’s front-office where she did accounting and bookkeeping. Worried about my lack of attention as a hyperactive young girl, she brought with her coloring books, the Wizard of Oz, and even Dunkin' Donuts to distract me. Yet, as soon as I stepped inside, I was infatuated with only the typewriter in the office. She sat me down, taught me the basics, and off I went into a journey through my own mind. My mom still keeps these documents in her desk as evidence of my eventual writer identity.

2. The existential view of my life as a book. Acknowledging that my life is often a series of unrelated events, I have from a young age worked subconsciously to craft the narrative that explains all of it. When I encountered sickness in my family: greater meaning. When I struggled with unhealthy relationships: I became more enlightened. Any struggle with my mental health would someday be diagnosed in my book. My book? What’s that about? Oh, by the way, the title will be something like “The Middle Man,” because I can always see things from both sides’ perspectives. To this day I can’t pinpoint where the idea came from, but it is almost as if I go about my life crafting the narrative. Whether or not I actually write the book is somewhat irrelevant. The lesson here is that I think and understand in narratives.

3. The need to explain myself through writing. For some people, language and speech come easy. I admire those people and their ability to articulate themselves almost effortlessly. This is not to say I am shy in social settings or reserved in my speech, but I often times find myself angry with my incompetence after explaining myself in a way that I didn’t actually mean. As a tutor, this problem comes often. “Give me a minute to write down what I mean,” I’ll often say. Going into any presentation or conversation I am nothing without reading over my organized notes. Because I have identified this in my own life, I have come to theorize the world into two groups: those who think in order to write and those who write in order to think.

 

Analyzing realizations like these, among many others in my life, brings me to a few conclusions. For one, I am a writer. As Joan Didion phrases it, “By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer, but simply a writer. I didn’t wake up one day and craft one piece that made me a self-proclaimed writer; rather, I looked back at the events and experiences that define me and identified this as my writer’s journey. This leads me to my second realization: being a writer constitutes a journey of failures, triumphs, setbacks and progress. My identity as a writer is so dynamic that it is different every single day. The roller coaster of writing development discourages many. Those who persevere and claim their journeys do so because of an intrinsic motivation. For me personally, there are a few core reasons why I write, why I am a writer, and why I am an Interdisciplinary Writing Minor:

 

I write to understand. One of my favorite parts of being a writer is setting out to conquer an assignment or a piece with little or no idea of my argument, organizing my thoughts into a sound composition, and coming to new understanding in my own conclusion. For me, writing is the medium I use to think and to construct meaning. The principles of logic and argument building allow us to do things like win a business case, move up the ranks at a job, or persuade others to see our opinions. Throughout my interdisciplinary writing minor, I have learned how to immerse myself in a new genre and adapt my writing to the conventions of that particular discourse community. For example, writing for an audience in psychology and writing in legal studies call for two vastly different outcomes and writing styles (see How to Write a Research Paper like a Psychologist and Legal Writing: Impersonal or Inhumane?). In each discipline, learning to understand these differences has allowed me to deepen my understanding of the subject myself, as I begin to adapt to them and write for the audience of that field. When I write academically, I am now able to critically analyze the overwhelming amounts of information and synthesize them into a sound argument. My development of writing to understand across several contexts can be traced through much of my college academic writing across divisional subjects.

 

I write to tell a story. I have been fascinated by the art of storytelling since I first learned of genres like the fable, tall tale, and short story in elementary school. As I matured and began experimenting with personal narratives, I learned that I have a strong propensity to introspect and enjoy finding compelling ways to craft my ideas into a story. Storytelling does not just succeed in the creative space: being able to craft a narrative has helped in disciplines like journalism, advertising, marketing, and even science writing. Being able to tell a story with information not only allows for easy consumption, but also leaves an imprint on the minds of readers. That being said, telling a creative fictional story, telling a personal story, and telling a news story call for three different techniques. I have been fortunate to work on all of the above and more throughout my college education.

 

I write to communicate. I often find myself ruminating over what others may call a minor choice of synonyms. This is because I find the power of language fascinating. As I have learned through classes like the Academic Research & Writing and the Structure of English, changing one word in my writing can shift the entire meaning dramatically. Additionally, new meaning in life can be created by the addition of new words. I have grown increasingly cognizant of these subtleties throughout my writing development. As I prepare to enter a career in consulting, I will need to look out for things that change the meaning of my memos and emails, as well as words that create bias I need not have in the industry. Communication will be key in my future career, and mastering the art of it through writing has and will help tremendously.

 

The above introspection and self-discovery led me to the creation of this portfolio. In finding a way to harbor all of my exercised writing skills over the years, I invite readers, as well as myself, to explore my writing development in each of these three areas: Understanding, Storytelling, and Communicating. But where exactly does the journey come into play? If I sat down when I was a four-year-old on the typewriter, when I was in elementary school, when I was a freshman in high school or even when I was a freshman at Wake Forest to answer the question why I write or why I am a writer, my responses would vary immensely. As a fourth grader writing short stories for my family, I wrote to exert my imagination and to entertain my family. As a high-schooler making it through the SAT and AP tests, I wrote to get a good score and to get into college. As a freshman in college, I wrote because I realized I might be pretty interested and possibly pretty good at it. To hear more about this journey, read my Writing Literacy Narrative under the Storytelling page.

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After four years of studying writing, immersing myself in new disciplines, tutoring students, and testing out unexplored genres throughout my minor, I have finally come to understand my writing journey and the reasons why I continue to exercise this expression of myself. The journey was not at all a straight line upwards and it will likely never be complete, but the most important thing is understanding that I have a journey that defines me as a writer. I write for many critical reasons and I will continuously strive for improvement because of these reasons.

Looking forward, I challenge myself to continuously test these self-motivations for my writing. As I enter a business career, I will certainly be writing to communicate and writing to understand. But how will I push myself to continue to story-tell? Will I discover a new motivation for my writing development? Regardless, my journey as a writer does not stop here. In fact, it has nearly just begun.