When I first arrived at the University of Michigan, I considered myself a fiction writer. I wrote about good people with human struggles, strong emotions, and enduring love. I had a host of characters living in my head and a wealth of stories filling my writing notebooks. However, I hadn't yet considered the complex relationship between author and reader and I didn't think about who my audience would be or how I would reach them. My writing was my own and I kept it completely private. I had a long way to go to become a creative writer. But through my experiences over the past four years, I have gained the confidence to share my work, acquired the ability to examine my writing critically, learned the skills to tell a sentimental story believably, discovered what matters most to me in my own writing, and found how to identify an appropriate audience for the types of pieces I want to write.

 

     The first new experience in creative writing came in my very first semester of college, in a class called Narration. Every two weeks, we were to turn in a new short story to the professor in his office, where he would read through it and then give his thoughts, edits, and suggestions. Before college, no one read my creative writing. I don’t know if I was embarrassed or shy, but I held my writing close to me like a security blanket. Suddenly, I was forced to expose my work and myself.

 

 

I fidget opposite the professor as he goes line by line through my short story. The basement office air is completely still. His shirt sleeve rustles against the wooden desk between us as his pencil hovers over each word printed in Times New Roman font. “I didn’t spend enough time on it. It’s so cheesy. The ending doesn’t work. The dialogue is ridiculous…” My mind whirls with doubts. My breathing seems loud in the tight space of the silent room.

 

When he is finished, he looks up at me and says, “You have a special gift with words.”

 

 

     That simple statement was my release. From that meeting, I slowly gained confidence in my writing and began to allow others to experience my art form.

 

     Then came the winter semester. The skies were cloudy, the sidewalks were slushy, and the air was frigid. I pushed myself further and enrolled in a Creative Writing Workshop course, in which each member of the class had to write an original fiction piece to be reviewed by the entire class. I decided to write a story that had been in my heart and on my mind for a long time. I wrote the story of two people I had gone to high school with: Jamie and Branden. Our parents had been friends, and since we lived in a small town, we grew to know each other.  Her senior year, Jamie was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her boyfriend, Branden was there through her diagnosis and treatment. Their story was one of inspiration, love, struggle, sadness, and hope. I wrote a fictionalized version of their story, to delve deeper into the experiences that I had been touched by, but not given full access to.

 

 

Sitting in an uncomfortable, blue plastic chair, my clammy hands tucked between my knees to stop the shaking, I’m required to be silent as twenty of my classmates, who don’t know me and aren’t familiar with the people who inspired my latest short story, critique and evaluate my work. Kind words and smiles begin the process, and I begin to relax. They like it! They think my story is good.

 

Then the girl across from me, her tiny, pointed nose tilted up slightly, says with a smirk, “These characters aren’t believable. No one would act this way.” She doesn’t know that these characters are entirely real. She doesn’t know the tears I’ve watched them shed. She wasn’t at their wedding only two months ago. She doesn’t know them, and she doesn’t understand that their true story was worth telling.

 

 

    

     After my workshop experience, I got discouraged. It felt like to write something creative and interesting, it had to be shocking, filled with exaggerated conflict. Characters couldn’t make moral decisions and be realistic. Happy endings were blah. There was a push against sentimentality, and I was told it had no place in good writing.

 

     With the core of who I was as a writer being questioned, I took a break from writing classes and focused on my English major. After a year-long break from creative writing, I took a Creative Non-Fiction class. I can’t remember now if someone suggested the course or the professor, or if I just happened upon it while searching through the course guide, but somehow I ended up in English 325.

 

     I was a fiction writer. I had no clue how to write non-fiction, but I was willing to learn and to try. The first assignment was to reflect on a time in our lives through a narrative structure. I didn’t know what to write about. What in my life had been significant up to that point?

    

     Eventually, I settled on a topic and began to write. It was illuminating. I was writing creatively, with my own personal tone, rhythm, word choice, and structure, but no one could tell me that what I was writing was not real. It was my story. I discovered that all my skills as a fiction writer translated into creative non-fiction, and I reveled in a new form of expression, illustrating a moment in my past that was more significant than I had ever been conscious of. My essay titled Falling went back ten years to when I was a competitive gymnast training five hours six days a week. After a serious injury at the gym, my essay explored the sudden presence of fear and the change in perception that occurs from childhood to adolescence.

 

“I climbed up on one of the five beams lined up along the edge of the spring floor. My arms went above my head, the toes of my right foot stretched out in front of me, poised to bend backwards until my hands gripped the leather of the beam and my legs arched over my upper-body one at a time. In just the moment when everything around me usually faded away and nothing was left but the feel of the beam and the trained movement of my body, my mind exploded. Everything turned deep red with fear. I couldn’t move a single muscle. My mind would not relinquish control to allow my body to travel backwards, and my body refused to admit fear and defeat by lowering my arms from their stiff, statuesque position. Motion continued around me as I stood solid in the middle of a battle between the young girl who trusted the beam to be where it always had been and the young woman who knew that gravity existed and was ready and waiting to push down anything that had the audacity to try and fly" (Falling, 6).

 

     Returning to an emotional time in my life was thrilling and scary. I attempted to include as much emotion as possible, emotion that was real, not just conflict but something deeper, which was not always comfortable. But if I wanted emotion to be appreciated in writing, to be acknowledged as valuable, the first place to start was with myself. So I told my own story.

 

     The essay allowed me to more deeply understand what it meant to tell an entirely true story. It was personal and I had all the details at my disposal, then the key was crafting the story in an interesting and informative way. I had to select the important moments to share and leave out the moments that were better untold. The intricacies of weaving a non-fiction narrative were challenging and inspirational as the thrill of writing came flooding back to me. I realized that through the exploration of creative non-fiction I was developing the skills to tell a sentimental story that could be believed by readers.

 

     The final assignment for the class was to combine a narrative with research. This time, selecting the subject was easy after a life-altering moment shared with my mom.

 

 

Lying beside my mother on the firm hotel mattress, my feet up in the air and my toes wiggling, my stomach ached from laughing. A visit from my mom always made me leave behind my worries about school and work and just enjoy the moment. I turned into a little girl again, carefree and prone to daydreaming. I flopped my feet on the bed and popped the last small morsel of Schakolad chocolate into my mouth. My mom rolled onto her side, looking at me, quiet. Then she turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

 

“I found a lump in my breast,” she said.

 

“When?” I asked.

 

“Two weeks ago.”

 

“Does Dad know? Have you seen a doctor?”

 

“I haven’t told your dad yet, and I haven’t called the doctor either.”

 

I’m the only one who knows. My mother has confided in me, her only daughter, the reality of something we haven’t dealt with in five years, since my grandmother had both of her breasts removed to treat her third diagnosis of breast cancer.

 

 

     My final essay for English 325, The C Word, intertwined the story of the women in my family with research on breast cancer. With raw emotion and concrete facts, personal details and extensive investigation into science and medicine, I wove a true narrative. For this assignment, I further developed my ability to merge the reality of life with the flourish of fiction, lending real conflict and authenticity to my sentimental writing.

 

“For an hour, everything felt normal. Another Christmas with my family, no one would be missing from our celebration, and that was something to be thankful for. There was another knock. I reached the door first this time and opened it to welcome my nana and papa. My nana stood with her shoulders back, a plate of her cherry treats covered in tin foil tucked in her left arm. Her smile was weak, not reaching her sunken eyes wrapped in dark circles, and she wore a new wig I hadn’t seen before. The hair was curled the same way her own hair always was, and the color was nearly a perfect match. Only the texture was different, coarser and thicker than her natural soft waves. My papa held her other arm, guiding her across the icy porch and through the front door. My dad took the desserts from her, and I hugged her carefully, feeling her frailness through the embrace. Instead of her large bosom squishing against me, the breasts I had laid my head upon like a pillow as a small child, our mostly flat bodies pressed against each other, the normal barrier of her breasts gone" (The C Word, 6).

 

     The essay was an opportunity to experiment with balancing sentimentality and factual information. It required research and personal reflection, and it was meant to not only relate facts about breast cancer and to explore concepts of love, loss, fear, and femininity, but to tell the story of the real experience of real people and real-life conflicts. Through the process of writing the piece, I was able to further practice and develop my new combination of narrative storytelling and creative non-fiction.

 

     The Creative Non-Fiction course got me excited about writing again. Before the semester was over, I applied for the Sweetland Minor in Writing, and was blessed to be accepted into the program.

 

     The Gateway course to the Minor in Writing gave me space to explore who I was as a writer and what I wanted to write. The first major writing assignment was an investigation into why we write. In Penned By Impulse, I took a creative approach with a reflective twist and found, again, that my strength was in blending the true with the narrative. My essay was emotional, it was personal, and it was real. I didn’t shy away, but was boldly honest about the emotions tied to my writing. “I write because I need to, because something inside tells me I must. It’s an impulse deeper than most of the survival instincts—since I can write through extreme hunger, thirst, and sleep deprivation—because the words have to be written. And this need to write isn’t fleeting; it is always there" (Penned By Impulse, 1). In being asked to consider why I practiced an activity that was integral to my life and put it on paper, I was forced to confront the true meaning writing held for me. The essay not only passionately explained my compulsion to write, but also aimed to communicate the motivations behind my style of writing and the contents of my stories.

 

“I write to capture moments. Even as I’ve been writing these words, I watched a young man walk across a room, with a stride illustrating an important direction. He walked to the corner of the large, white room to kiss a young woman tenderly on the forehead, turn, and move away again. Watching, I realized I am a writer. Writers see spectacular things in the mundane. In a small gesture, I saw notebooks full of words I could tie together with the emotion of a single, simple instant I was witness to on a normal Wednesday" (Penned By Impulse, 4).

 

     In this essay, I was forced to own my writing and to admit my motivations. In writing the piece, I found what was driving me and became able to articulate what mattered to me and how writing fulfilled that need. I finally was confident that the emotion of writing was vital to who I was as a writer, and I firmly decided to remain true to that piece of who I was, not to let the opinions of others change me, and to continue to utilize emotion and sentiment to fill my writing and move my readers.

           

     Having discovered my strengths and defined who I was as a writer, I began thinking about my Capstone Project. I needed it to be meaningful and wanted it to reflect my distinct style. Hoping to compose melodic prose in narrative non-fiction, I drafted a plan to write something I truly cared about, returning to my original desire to write love stories, while doing so in an entirely new way. I would become a wedding journalist, covering weddings, interviewing couples, and preserving their unique story. The project would come together though a blog called With Love, telling real love stories, capturing moments, communicating emotion, and expressing sentiment unapologetically. I found a specific audience who would enjoy my writing and who I could write for while also writing for myself.

 

     My journey as a writer has not been long and tortuous, nor has it been free from difficulty. Through my writing evolution, I have gained and lost confidence, lost and found my voice, changed for others and for myself, and now find myself to be the same person I was when I set out, with the same beliefs, goals, and loves, but with increased abilities, a healthier acceptance of criticism, a greater sense of self, and new avenues for expressing my art form.