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Sabrina Cardenas
Professor DerOhanessian
English 115
24 September 2014
Starting Somewhere
Growing up, English was always the class I excelled in. I was fairly decent in History, I
enjoyed reading about the past wars and people like Harriet Tubman and Alexander Graham Bell.
I wasnt tremendously terrible in science either, up until protons and neutrons introduced
themselves in chemistry. And as for math, well, when the math gods decided to add the alphabet
into problems, my brain lost all capacity to retain any more information concerning math for
long periods of time. But English was always constant. Though at first I hated reading and
writing, it was not until high school that I realized it is a big part of who I am.
At some point in between my sixth and seventh year, I noticed myself dozing off in
classes, mostly math classes, and writing little stanzas on the margins of my papers. Sentences
would form up in my head and I just had to write them down. I gathered all my scraps of poetry
and rewrote them all in a composition notebook. After a year and a half of amateur poetry, I
could not write them as smoothly as I used to and noticed that I was not forming ideas for poems
anymore; I was writing excerpts for short stories or possible book ideas. They went from rhyme
schemes to complete sentences and stanzas turned into paragraphs. Though I slowly began to
write, this does not mean that a love for reading grew quickly after.
If it were up to me, I would have never touched a book for school. But as I got older and
moved from grade to grade, assigned reading was inevitable. In eighth grade my English teacher,
Miss Kobaissi, made reading logs count for about ten percent or so of our grades. I did

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everything I could think of to try and cheat out of reading an entire book. I picked a 512 page
book, Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult, to keep from reading any more books. I would skip a
handful of chapters and read one chapter in between every few: the first, the tenth, the seventieth,
and the last chapter and Spark Note the ones in between. It sufficed for the small amount of
reading I was actually assigned. Oddly enough, though, that summer I started reading on my own,
for pleasure, and to this day I have not kicked my habit of binge reading. Though I did not bring
up Miss Kobaissi because of her forcing me to read books; I bring her up because she was the
first teacher who ever praised me on my writing. Her praise encouraged me to be more confident
in my writing, even if my confidence level boosted up only by an inch.
One week, our lesson was on poetry and rhyme scheme. She told us to pick whatever
topic we wanted as long as it was PG and to write one stanza about it. The next class day she said
she was going to read them all to the rest of the class and we had to guess who wrote it. There
were many humorous poems and some that were not taken very seriously, writing simply a
Roses are red knockoff poem. It was easy to attach a classmates name on to these poems.
But when she got to mine she paused before reading it, looked at it with appreciation, and simply
stated that this was her favorite. She read it and nobody in the class was able to pinpoint who
wrote it. Though the class was not as amazed as Miss Kobaissi was, her praise, the first praise I
had ever received, has stayed with me to this day.
In my sophomore year of high school, I transferred from my home school to one further
than just a short ten minute bus ride away. It was in that new high school that I realized what it is
I might want to major in in college. I was in regular English for the first semester of my
sophomore year, where my teacher advised me every class period to think about transferring into
Honors English because my writing was advanced for his class. I had never been in Honors

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before and, honestly, I was terrified of it. Was it because of all the work I knew I would have to
do? Was it because I knew how much harder it was going to be? Was it because I did not want to
be labeled as a nerd because I was in honors? I cannot pinpoint a reason as to why I was so
reluctant that first semester to switch. But come second semester, it was not my choice anymore.
The councilor had apparently agreed with my English teacher, as well as my new Honors teacher.
It was in that Honors English class, the subject that for so many years I believed to be my
strength and expected to excel in, that I realized I did not know as much as I thought I did.
I have never mastered the art of purposely incorporating specific literary devices into an
essay, nor have I mastered the art of analyzing an essay for specific literary devices. I say
purposely because I usually write an essay through to the end and my teachers would tell me I
have this and that literary device here and there. But if I were to write an essay and focus on
making sure that I get those specifics into the essay, it would take me a long time to complete it
and I would struggle more than I usually would. The terms and the definitions confused me that
only the most basic of devices would stick to my memory. Though I never really pointed out my
flaws in my favorite subject, literary devices were always one of my weaknesses. My honors
teacher, who was also the seniors AP literature teacher, made that very clear when I auditioned
for a spot in the senior class and was rejected for my lack of literary device analysis on the essay.
As disappointed as I was in not getting into a higher level of English, this did not discourage me
from writing.
Overtime I have discovered a pattern in the way I write. I would gain an idea, come up
with a sentence, or even a characters name, and immediately I would start writing. I would
conjure up stacks of papers with excerpts of continuing stories or entirely different ones and stuff
them all in a notebook. I am not the kind of person to stay unorganized for longer than a week

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but somehow I could never get those excerpts organized even when I organized them. It was
always messy and there were always scraps of paper here and there that I would eventually get
frustrated and leave it alone for a long time. This, I now realize, has contributed to my writers
OCD. First drafts have never been easy for me to get through, not only because of the difficult
task of coming up with an introduction, but also because of this OCD. Like Anne Lamott wrote
in an excerpt from her book Bird by Bird, all I had to do was to write a really shitty first draft
And no one was going to see it (Lamott 1). Though this was, and still is, precisely my problem.
First drafts are not meant to be organized, let alone perfect; it is because first drafts are
unorganized that it is a challenge to get through. On countless occasions I have started stories
and have gotten as far as fifteen pages in, but when I would feel writers block approaching, Id
go back to the beginning and start reading over it. This is a bad habit of mine for it results in me
editing it before I have even finished the first draft. Once I realize that none of it makes sense,
there are too many contradictions, or that I have no idea where the story is going, I stop writing it
for a while, sometimes all together. For this progression essay alone, I went through three first
drafts before writing an acceptable draft to print out. In none of those first drafts did I know
what my main idea was or what exactly I was writing about. Lamott stated in her book that
almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts (pg. 2), yet those first efforts are a
struggle for me to get through. Though she was speaking about writing a piece, review, or story,
I have taken this phrase to be relevant in not just writing something specific, but also writing in
general.
I despised writing once but never truly gave it a chance, the same for reading; now they
are a part of my day to day life. I did not enter into these two worlds flawlessly, I did not even
picture myself in these two worlds seven years ago. Though I have chosen Creative Writing as

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my major, there are still lingering thoughts in my mind wondering if I can do this; writing when I
struggle with it every day yet find serenity with it. Lamott has given me a new motto to live by
and to motivate me to keep writing; you need to start somewhere (pg. 2) and this is where I
aim to begin.

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Work Cited
Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. New York: Anchor, 1995.
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