Writing History

I’ve never really taken a keen interest in writing, and often feel as though it is a forced burden. Although I’m a creative person and generally enjoy expressing myself though art and drama, for some reason I seem to dislike creative writing the most. Perhaps these subconscious emotions are more deeply rooted and born from my past experiences with different teachers and the environment in which I was taught to utilize different writing skills. My jr. high and early high school english teacher utilized a very rigid and old fashioned teaching style focusing primarily on grammar and form. Although he was forced by the school to emphasize creative writing, he seemed to care little of content and writing style but rather of grammar, punctation and pronoun reference errors. I’m not trying to undermine the importance of such writing instruments but when taught for so many years that they where the only things that matter in my writing, I began to view writing, even creative writing as nothing but rules and restrictions. Junior year my english teacher was a very creative woman, but also very stressed and organized. Although our projects were very creative she would assign multiple writing projects at once, so many that she would often forget about some or cancel them midway through completion, creating unimaginable stress which I in turn now associate with writing.  the first positive class room experience I had with writing was in AP European History, where I was taught to write intelligent essays utilizing critical thinking and logic. On the whole I suppose my feelings associated with writing are those of restriction and stress, especially since my poor spelling and grammatical skills conflict with my perfectionism making the writing process very time consuming and wearisome.