Personal Narrative

In elementary school I used to enjoy projects where we had to write our own stories and complete the pages with pictures or drawings. I would make up all kinds of stories of all sorts like an All-Star basketball player who couldn’t be stopped, magical worlds, to even an evil Tooth Fairy. Short Fiction is kind of the only writing that I like to do. Going into Middle and High School I was introduced to formal, structured type of writing that was way different from what I liked to write when I was younger. As I got more and more formal writing prompts I began to stop like writing. It because a struggle for me to transition from fun, fictional writing to formal types of

Beth and I took turns writing. I remember only being able to write about a half of a page before my hand would begin to hurt. We must have worked on it for about four hours, and then we were done with our masterpiece. Beth and I both thought that our book was by far the best we had ever read. We were sure we were the most ingenious children alive. The end result of our story was not so pleasant, however. We decided to read our story to my younger sister Kari, to gain her opinion on our brilliance. Kari hated the story. She became bored very quickly and found something else to do. Beth and I were crushed. However, we were determined to try again some day, and we did. We wrote countless stories

When I was younger I had always been described as mature. Although I wasn’t anywhere near being “mature”, it was a word always used to describe me, well-mannered and mature. While my brother was goofy and social, I was shy and serious. We were twins yet total opposites. As a child, because that was the word almost always associated with me, it crae unusual, almost toxic idea about myself. I had to be mature to be what people liked about me. So, it never occurred to me to be able to not take myself seriously and say something like “Oops that was dumb” and laugh it off. For some reason that didn’t make sense to me to say silly things like that.

My memoir, “Terror in Target”, was one of my favorite writing assignments from this year. My writing voice in the story sounds like the words came through a cable hooked up to my brain. I held nothing back, making every thought funny and brutally honest. I believe that was the best part of my writing overall. I included thoughts that I’m sure I had when I was seven years old and took the reader and myself back to 2008 Target. However, I also noted many errors that could have been easily been fixed. At the time of birth, I don’t think I really cared about the grammar or flow of the story; I just cared about getting the story out in a fun and enjoyable way. As I reread my story, I changed things and fixed errors, revealing that I had grown into the mind of an editor of my own work. I found that my writing was strong in

Since elementary school I have exhibited a talent for writing. What started out as mere ten page stories about cats hunting mice or Greek Gods turning people into blob fish expanded into publishing a four hundred page long summer camp murder mystery as an eBook with my friend Henry in eighth grade. Over the years I have become more passionate about my writing, and over the years my grammar and writing style have grown tremendously. Looking back at the book I helped write in eighth grade I can’t help but cringe at the mistakes we missed and dull language we used. If I had written the eBook at the level I am now it would have been much longer, extremely detailed, and correct grammar wise. I realize the story could be leagues better, so I’m currently

Two years after we had signed the gas lease my father stopped farming. The cows and the pigs were sold to the Baker’s farm on the other side of Iberdeen. So were his two tractors along with most of the other equipment that had taken up real estate on our land. Now our house sat on almost three hundred acres of dirt, grass, hay, fieldstone, history.

It was the last day of school and I was so excited for summer. I was going to do all kinds of stuff and go out of the state. In reality I was going for one of my worst summer ever. All I was going to do is travel most of the time. It was going to be the most boring summer ever.

My day starts out like most of a dollar’s day starts. As I rest in my owners wallet. He grabs his wallet and slides it in his back right-hand pocket, with me included. This is how my journey begins.

I was only thirteen when I first began to ask “who am i?” My parents would tell me stories of where I’m from, and how Sudan is like. My little brain couldn’t grasp the idea of having family, people that look like me, in the other side of the world. Going there was a dream for me, I had this vision in my head, this adventure I thought waiting for me, and so, I began to nag! “Can we go this summer daddy?” became one of my favorite things to say. I asked and asked, until I got what I wanted.

At a young age I discovered my eagerness to learn, and engage myself in the world of literature. My curiosity grew exponentially. By the time I was in middle school, I had dedicated my time to crafting my own fictional novels. I dreamed of one day finding success and becoming an author. At the top of my novel would read- New York Times Best Selling Author.

I am very disappointed in my writing thus far. I look at stories I wrote in my previous CRW class and wonder where all my imagination has gone. I feel my work has been very stagnant. I think the biggest problem is that I took an old story

One Sunny morning in March 2010 I woke up getting ready for work. I couldn’t find where I put my keys to the apartment, but I found the keys. I arrived at work around 7:45 a.m. thinking and preparing for the school day. I entered the school and returned to my workstation to eat an apple and donut before starting bus duty. I walked up front to receive the students off the bus and carpool. Receiving the students with a warm good morning and a great big smile, ‘wow’ without my teeth showing, funny huh! While waiting for the last carpool, a person said to me, you didn’t have to go down like that. Meaning you did not deserve that. I said to the person, what are you talking about, I became confused. The person said to me you come to work on time,

My first literary experience started before I even enter preschool. When I was younger, I was diagnosed with a speech impediment. This forced me to attend a specialized preschool, which led to speech classes in my early years in elementary school. I couldn't talk without stuttering. I remember being at school and getting pulled out of the lesson. I remember the faces of my other classmates staring then asking why I got to get out of our class assignment. I remember being questioned by my peers as to why I couldn't pronounce certain words or speak more smoothly. I was always asked to slow down and repeat myself. Sadly, the school I attended was underfunded, so as soon as I could speak at more of an understandable level I was essentially removed from my speech class, despite the fact that my speech was terrible and I still couldn't pronounce certain words and syllables. The hope of me improving was diminishing. Luckily, I moved schools a year later; nonetheless, it was too late. My new school wouldn't realize what learning setbacks I still had.

The first time I tried to write a story I was in grade school. It was for a seventh or eighth grade assignment. It was about a puppy who got lost and was stranded. He was found by a police dog who brought him back to his home and made sure he stayed safe. I still have the story at my house. I wrote a different short story in my eighth grade year that was very dramatic. I wrote about a girl who was extremely young that got pregnant, and ran away from home so she could keep the baby. It told about how she didn’t believe she got pregnant and how she felt. It was SUPER dramatic in how the girl reacted and the punishment she received from her mother at the end was really slack and unrealistic. I didn’t understand what I was writing about at the time and didn’t understand the seriousness involved. If I wrote the same story now, you wouldn’t be able to tell it was the same one, besides the basic outline. The punishment would be more severe and the way the girl reacted would be different. I would also change her age so she was in the upper grades of high school, not the lower.(I think I made the girl thirteen to fifteen years old.)

I was never fully one to write down my experiences and stories into printed word, I have always been very audible storyteller, and still am to this day. I will say that for an extend period of my life, I did enjoy expressing my creativity through writing. Short stories, poetry, and and even essays on certain topics were some of my favorite things to write. For the most part, however, I was really bad at making sense in my writing. I was bad at grammar, bad at creating an interesting story, bad at the things that made the writers of the past great. I suppose that didn’t really matter though; I enjoyed writing, I enjoyed getting better, and I enjoyed when people would take pity and say they had enjoyed my work. I tried my best to do better, though. English had always been one of my favorite classes, so naturally, I put a large chunk of effort into it. I’ve also been very fortunate to have very passionate and caring teachers, in both middle and high school. Middle school in particular was where I had peaked as a writer. It was where I wrote the most, and to this day is the only place where I put true passion into the things I wrote. It’s sad for me to say, however, that I can’t fully remember a time recent when I wrote something I was uniquely proud of, something that I can call my own. Most of my portfolio from the past 5 or so years has mainly been a required, graded, stress-filled jumble that I couldn’t fully enjoy. It’s not to say that I don’t have ideas, though. For a