Personal Narrative: A Career As A Writer

“Class, welcome to class. I am excited to meet all of you. We have lots of exciting things that we are going to be learning this year and one thing we are going to learn is how to be writers.” My new teacher, Ms. Shaw gushed. I twisted my head, to look around. I didn’t need to, I already knew there wasn’t a solitary window and imaginarily I slapped my forehead and fell to the ground writhing as if I were in immense pain. As if a million miles away, I heard Ms. Shaw declare “The hardest part of writing is being willing to share what you write, so the first thing that we are going to do is to get to know each other.” I heard as my body continued to spasm. Would anyone would notice if I ran out of the class screaming, I pondered? With another

After school I would arrive home and our neighbor, Ms. Elizabeth would have surprisingly found an “old” backpack remarkably containing all of my necessary school supplies supposedly left by mistake sometimes she missed a price tag or two, but she did her best to find and remove them all. I liked her, even if she smells funny from a perfume that my mom says is expensive and was a terrible cook. Nervously I hoped that Ms. Shaw wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t written anything. Out of the corner of my eye, she glided towards me-nope, my luck had run out. Crouching down, she whispers "I am certain you can think of something. Tell me something that you like to do." "I like to swim. "Well, that is a start, why don't you write three sentences. One saying that you like to swim, one telling me where you go swimming and one telling me your favorite thing about swimming or who swims with you-you can do that, I am certain," she encouraged. I thought to myself, three sentences-I can do that. I looked at my blank paper and heard Ms. Shaw whisper “ok, now what is your first sentence?” “Uh, I like to swim?” “Yes, perfect, write that down.” I wrote down I like to swim. “Now what do you write?” she urged “Well, I go to my dad’s” I mumbled. “Perfect!” she chirped “Write down where your Dad lives and tell us a little bit about

When the jellyfish come we don't swim any more than we just walk around the colony and sometimes Bobby walks on his hands. The coolest thing we do is watch the storms come to the island. We sit on the jetty and you can see the rain move across the water-it's really cool-one side wave, the other side rain. “Katryna, Katryna" I jump when Ms. Shaw touches my arm. "It is time to go. We will work on this next class. If you really want to, you can write more at home and we can add it, next class, when we revise it." "Revise it, what is that?" as I panicked "Don't worry, we will learn about revising and how we do it." "But, wait" I stuttered "it is perfect, isn't it? Did I do it wrong? I slumped with discouragement. "Oh, No, no, no, you are right it is perfect we are just going to make it so other people will understand what we are trying to tell them." "Oh," I mumbled, "it is not any good." "Oh, Katryna, it is great, really and I’m the teacher right?” “Yeah” “hmm, let’s see we are also going to do something else in here we are going to write in journals and we don’t revise your writing, she assured.” “Really?” I asked her disbelievingly. "Yes, really. What you are going to learn is some writing is going to be, well, for me and that we are going to try and make it better every time and other writing, well, you are right it is