Rewriting

When I was a freshman in high school, I decided to join the newspaper. It was an okay paper; there weren’t a lot of typos, and some of the articles were actually really good. (While most of them were still about school lunch and the “Backpack Policy,” a policy people didn’t care about at all.) My first role on the paper was to write articles, and by the next semester, I was the page editor for A&E. It was then that I realized I had somewhat of a knack for graphic design. Of course my pages in the paper weren’t without flaws; the programs we used took some getting used to. I would never have learned them, though, if not for all the magazines and books I used to breeze through, making mental notes of the little things I liked in all the award-winning pages. From there on out, drawing inspiration from other people’s work became the only way I could get my work done. Not only with the newspaper, but also with writing. 

That’s the first thing that came to my mind when reading the first chunk of Rewriting by Harris. He argues, “Almost all academic essays and books contain within them the visible traces of other texts--in the form of notes, quotations, citations, charts, figures, illustrations, and the like.” If you actually sit down and think about everything you’ve ever read or watched, you’ll notice a minuscule amount of it is original. It’s the same as aspiring to be more like a role model; we’re all constantly tweaking the way we write by taking note of the characteristics of our favorite writing. 

I read this book last year over Spring Break called Room by Emma Donoghue. I thought it was a really cool book; the narrator was this five-year-old boy who’s mother was kidnapped seven years prior. So this kid had never seen the light of day, and he thought everything that was on TV was imaginary and a bunch of other stuff but that’s not really the point. The point is, when I was in a creative writing class and had to write a story about anything, I chose to do what I saw in Room: make the narrator a little kid. My story was nothing like the plot of Room, but I never would’ve written it if I hadn’t read that book. 

So I realize I kind of went on a lot of tangents and failed to touch on a healthy portion of the blog prompt, but I’m good with that.