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There I sat, starting the the beige walls lined with motivational posters. Success. Dreams. Goals. The usual. Motivational posters with these titles lined the bland, beige walls. It was the summer going into 8th grade. It was a Creative Writing seminar held at a local middle school. Every class began the same way. The teacher would walk in a couple minutes late and we had a brainstorming session. I was given a blank piece of paper and a pencil and expected to pick a single idea out of the stew of them I had brewing in my head. Mrs. Weinstein was our teacher. She cared very little about the class and even less about teaching us. Everyday would have the same routine. Brainstorming, writing, editing. Over and over again. I felt as if I was living in a world where everything was bland and gray. Nothing was unique.
For the final project, we were expected to write a creative piece on the assigned topic of Mount Everest. I decided not to follow the crowd and instead wrote a 8 page paper on an E.E Cummings poem I had come across. I was fascinated by his style. I experienced a somewhat jarring, incomprehensible effect from his work. He used unconventional grammatical rules that generated brilliant sentences such as "why must itself up every of a park." The page was his canvas and the words were his brushes. I had become so influenced by his writing, that I had written the majority of my paper in his nonsensical style. I included sentences such as "why believe ocean throughout anagrams?" It was as if a seed encapsulating his style had been implanted in me. The seed sprouted into a plant and kept growing and growing the farther I got into the paper. By the end, I had become engrossed in his style. After turning in my paper, when my teacher was expecting a creative essay about Mt Everest, my teacher told me that I was a failure as a writer. What I thought was my best work ever, had been completely disregarded as trainwreck. This criticism has stuck with me ever since.
It was the first time that I had ever felt alive while writing. I felt exhilarated. I felt as if pure adrenaline had been injected into my heart. Why should I have to abide to some assigned topic or a five paragraph structure? Writing should let the individual express himself freely. He shouldn't have a topic or format imposed on him. Why others in my class were writing about how Mt. Everest is 8848 meters high, I was writing about "responsible guitars inside meadow of rubik's cube". They were writing about mundane facts about how much snow Mt. Everest gets in December, I was writing about "Noah spreads cows until calculus monsoon." My philosophy is best described by a quote from novelist Melinda Haynes: "Forget all the rules. Write for yourself and celebrate."
