On Writing

This blog post is about to get a little meta: a piece of writing about writing.

I remember coming home one day from first grade and announcing to my parents that, when I grew up, I was going to be a writer. In class that day, I had finished a worksheet early, so my teacher gave me a supplementary assignment to do while I waited for the rest of the class to finish. The assignment was to write a short story using as many of the spelling words for the week as possible. I don’t know if the words for that week were really weird or if I was just an imaginative six-year-old, but I ended up writing about an anthropomorphized pig who had a passion for dance and taught kids how to stand up to bullies. My teacher later read the story out loud to my class and gave me a giant smiley face sticker for the effort.

That short story marked the start of my proliferative elementary school writing career. “The Little Dancing Pig,” as I had titled it, quickly expanded into a whole series in which the protagonist pig went on a wide range of adventures, from being on TV to learning to jump rope. I wrote other works as well, including a myth with a strangely Lamarckian take on why the giraffe got its long neck and an Agatha Christie-style mystery about a diamond necklace stolen on a train, but the pig series was by far my favorite.

I was pretty quiet and shy in person as a kid, but when it came to writing, it was like I couldn’t shut up. I almost never had trouble coming up with new ideas to write about and I took any opportunity I could find to get these ideas down on paper. If anything, I usually struggled with concision in my writing because there was often so much that I wanted to say and so many interesting words I could use to say it. I liked that writing allowed me to be both imaginative, so that I could pretend I lived in a world different from my own, where pigs danced and bullies were easily silenced, and reflective, so that I could make sense of my own very real life and experiences.

The original copy of “The Little Dancing Pig.” It reads (with spelling and some grammar corrected for readability):

Once upon a time there was a little pig that wanted to dance. The pig had two friends. Their names were Pink Pink Pig and Big Pig. One day, there was a play and Little Pig wanted to dance in it, so the other pigs let him. He danced great, but there was a dog that did not like him, so he said it [the pig’s dancing] is bad. But they did not listen to him and he danced in the play. The end.

My love of writing as a child was fueled also by my love of reading. The Magic Tree House series, which followed siblings Jack and Annie as they travelled through history via a mysterious tree house in the woods, was a personal favorite of mine for a lot of elementary school. The books taught me that writing stories was a way to make sometimes boring moments in history both more exciting and relatable. In fourth grade, I dressed up as the great American author Jack London for biography day because I, too, wanted to be an author when I grew up (though admittedly, I found even the simplified children’s versions of White Fang and Call of the Wild to be a bit dry). The Harry Potter series, then later the Hunger Games, inspired me to want to write fantasy and science fiction works to get teens as invested in reading as I was at the time.

Fiction wasn’t the only kind of writing I liked to do. In middle school, English was my favorite subject, and I enjoyed writing analytical essays about literature, history, and many other topics just as much as I liked writing short stories. Science didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me back then and I found math to be incredibly boring, but writing excited me! A bit to my family’s chagrin, I decided in eighth grade that I would one day study English in college, so that I could work as a journalist, while writing fiction on the side until I made it as a best-selling author.

Things changed a bit when I got to high school, however. I had never really liked science as a kid, but freshman year I enrolled in Honors Physics, mostly, I think, because I was too proud not to take all honors courses. I expected to hate physics, but it ended up being my favorite class that year. My teacher, Mr. Shapiro, was amazing at explaining problem solving strategies. My math abilities skyrocketed and, for the first time ever, I felt like I actually understood the underlying intuition behind science concepts. I still really enjoyed English class, of course, but after freshman year, I liked science just as much.

Then, junior year, I came upon biology, which I grew to like even more than physics. Biology allowed me to understand human nature—something I had always looked to literature and writing for—through a scientific lens. I saw it as the perfect balance of natural science motivated by inherently humanist questions. Neuroscience, my major in college, especially intrigued me because it was a way of understanding how the human brain is able to be so creative when performing tasks such as writing.

People will sometimes ask me why I chose such a STEM-heavy program of study in college when I also love reading and writing so much. At the last essay conference for my freshman year Expository Writing class, I remember the instructor looking me in the eye and asking, “Do you actually like any of this? Or does writing come so easily to you that you find it boring?” I think she, too, was confused why I was studying Neurobiology and Statistics when my passion for writing seemed to make me better fit for English or Comparative Literature.

If I’m being honest, it’s a question I struggle with a lot myself, as well. I guess part of the answer is that I’ve grown to appreciate the objectivity of science, whereas the subjectivity of literary analysis or what is considered “good writing” can sometimes leave me frustrated if I think about it for too long. Another part of it is that I like writing as a hobby; when you start to add deadlines and complex academic vocabulary to a hobby, however, it can become stressful instead of grounding and fulfilling. There’s also the fact that there are plenty of amazing writers in the English departments of every university in this country, but in the era of fake news, anti-vaxxers, and climate change deniers, the sciences need people who are good writers, too. Learning science in school, then being able to write about it well on my own, feels increasingly more urgent. If I could do college over again multiple times, I’d probably pick English as my major at least one of those times. But because you only get one undergrad experience, you inevitably have to just pick something you know you’ll like at the expense of other things you also like.

Though I may not be writing stories about adventurous pigs anymore, I love writing today just as much as I did way back in elementary school when I first fell in love with it. It’s why I chose to work as a Writing Center tutor in college and why I decided to start this blog. There’s power behind words. For me, writing has always been a way to harness that power to share ideas, feelings, and stories.

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This post is part one of a three-part series I’m working on about writing and communication. To read part two, click here. To read part three, click here.