Introduction: World's Worse Writer
When I was a little girl, only about five years old, I wanted to be an artist. My drawings were terrible and my paintings were worse, but something was appealing about creating something beautiful with just a blank piece of paper. When I entered into first grade, I found a new medium - writing. As I began to learn the basics of writing, it didn't strike me as dull. In fact, it did just the opposite. Writing became my way to paint a picture without colors, except white, which was the paper, and a dull gray, which was the pencil lead. Now it didn't take all day to paint a picture. All I had to do was a couple strokes with my hand and the meaning was converyed, sometimes even more effectively than the picture.
As I learned more about writing, I began creating my own picture books. I would write short stories, which seem unbearably simple now, and painstakingly draw crude pictures to go along with the story. As I learned more, I began more ambitious illustrated stories, my longest being about twenty pages. Then, around scond grade, I stopped.
In second, third, and fourth grade, my life was school. No more did I pursue any form of writing, and if I did write, it was grudingly done for school. I had no time for it anymore, nor did I want to continue it. It just didn't matter.
In fact, I never really thought I would actually be a good writer. My grammar, at best, was terrible, my sentence structure was hideous, my handwriting was worse, and I couldn't express my ideas at all. If there was any really bad writer, it was me. While I wrote, my papers were unorganized at best, nonsensical at worst. I had been scolded by teachers (I was in public school at the time) about how "silly" and unorganized my writing was, and I just thought I never would be good at it.
Then, around fifth grade, my teacher taught me how to write essays. I was interested, of course, and did entire reports on animals, books, and other scholarlythings. I wasn't quite interested in it (I never did write my own stories) but it seemed fun to do all the research at the time. And I did like it. But I didn't think much of it. After all, my writing sucked and I was not good at it. Besides, there were more important things. Like fitting in. Like trying to get friends. Like homework.
And then it all changed. In six grade, I was homeschooled.
