At ten-years-old, I was a tall, lanky fourth grader with grown up teeth far too big for my small, childlike mouth. I had long, blonde curls that my mother insisted on dressing up with ribbons and bows and that was the first year that I could wear smacker’s lip gloss outside of playing dress up with my older sisters left over prom dresses. Looking back, fourth grade is the year that contains many of my most cherished childhood memories.
One of the memories that sticks out the most was going Mrs. Bonner’s creative writing class every day.
In my elementary school, once you reached fourth grade, you were expected to rotate. What this meant is that rather than having one teacher who taught you all the subjects, you would rotate to different classrooms where one teacher would oversee one subject and another teacher would oversee another, etc.
Before Mrs. Bonner’s class, I thought English was a boring subject filled with rules, commas and sentence structure; however, it didn’t take long for me to realize that English is so much more than grammatical rules.
As a child, I always had one foot in the real world and the other stuck in my imagination. When I wasn’t at school, I could be found with a blanket tide around my neck pretending to be a superhero or with a pencil in hand pretending to be at Hogwarts with Ron, Harry and Hermione. Creativity was as much a part of me as the air that filled my lungs.
Through creative writing, I was given an outlet for my imagination that was both productive and fun. While I knew there were people who wrote creatively, it hadn’t ever really occurred to me that a fourth grader could also write stories. Thanks to Mrs. Bonner, I began writing short stories and subjecting my mom to reading all of them.
Aside from introducing me to creative writing itself, I was also introduced to this concept of adding voice to your writing. I am lucky that this was introduced to me early because it is an important concept and one that is frequently over looked.
Voice can be defined as an author’s writing style, the quality that makes his or her writing unique, and which conveys the author’s attitude, personality, and character. Anyone, even a fourth grader, can write a story. Very few people can breathe life into their story through the usage of their voice.
It can be difficult to develop your voice. It is certainly not something I accomplished when I was ten-years-old and it’s not even something I have solidified at twenty. What I have found, is the best way to develop your own writing voice is to study the writing voices of other great writers. Read Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.K. Rowling, Edgar Allen Poe and see what they techniques used in their writing that you admire and then incorporate it into your own writing.
I think that people can be afraid of pulling from different influences because they do not want to their work to be a carbon copy of one of the greats. The reality is that, as human beings, who we are is nothing more than a collection of the people and things we admire mashed together with our unique personalities.
A great mathematician is not expected to come up with a formula from scratch. He or she builds on the work of great minds that were working before them. Why would writing be any different?
To create your own style, you must read a lot because that is the only way that you will find a writing style you admire. The first author I ever admired was J.K. Rowling. To this day, I can still hear the whispered remnants of her voice lingering in my own writing. I’m perfectly fine with that. In fact, I am gratefully because, without her and Mrs. Bonner, I might never have pursued being a writer in the first place.
