Remember The Mantra

To begin this tale lets go back, back to the time of naps and sippy cups, back to preschool…there I was, sitting in the basement of our teacher’s house, Mrs. Jensen, around our gigantic work table. Mrs. Jensen is walking around the table handing out our project for the day. When she sets the paper down I stare in horror at what sits in front of me. Its something I have never seen before: it’s an A. She instructs us to trace the A’s and then write some on our own. With shaky hands I begin to trace the first capital A, down one side, connect at the top, and then cross in the middle, I repeat to myself. That wasn’t too bad I think and move onto the next one, its lower case A. I take a deep breath and then just go for it. Easy! With a satisfied smile on my face, I move on to the next and sail through the rest of the paper. I know what you’re thinking, you can’t believe I did it and you are very proud of me.  That’s when things took a turn for the worse. I turn my paper over and staring at me is one capital A and one lowercase A. Only one!? This can’t be right, I think as panic starts to engulf me. I grip my pencil tighter with my sweaty, little hand and swallow hard. I put pencil to paper and then slowly repeat my mantra, down one side, connect at the top, and then cross in the middle. This is where I must have blacked out because the next thing I know I just did my first capital A and lower case A without any help! Writing as best as a four-year-old can, I slowly finish my first writing assignment.

In elementary, the only class I can remember writing in was Mrs. Smith’s second grade class, and that’s because we had to illustrate our writing also. The rest of my days at Ferron Elementary are a blur. Eighth grade, that’s when things start coming into focus. I had Mrs. Card for English and I was scared. I knew it was going to be a tough class and it was. At first I did not enjoy writing at all. I am not very good at pulling things out of thin air, and some of our first assignments were just that. Writing made me mad and I dreaded doing it.  Our last assignment of the year, a research paper about a country changed that. This paper I didn’t have to make things up; it was right there, and all I had to do was find it. I loved getting information about Russia and making it sound cooler than it really was. That was also around the time Nikki moved back home. She helped me a lot during this process, and made it easy for me to understand, especially when it came to introduction and concluding paragraphs. That research paper was the best paper I did. I ended up getting a 95 percent on it; it was a 97 percent but she erased it and put a 95 for some reason. After that, writing became a little bit easier to me so when 9th grade rolled around I had a better attitude about it. My favorite paper was one I wrote about my Granddad, Bob Owens; I almost got that story published.

I have developed a routine that includes a box of cheez-its, a blue powerade, chocolate somewhere in between, and my mother’s laptop. I sit down right after school when I’m good and hyper and start my paper. I get a good idea and write until my idea stops or until I run out of energy. That’s when I get up and go to my piano for awhile and collect myself then start writing again. When I’m writing and I can’t think of what should go next, I read my story aloud and make a few changes, and then that next sentence just comes to me. I re-read my story a lot so I can make sure I get it just right, and then have my mom or Nikki read through it. They check for punctuation, and to make sure my sentences make sense to other people and not just me.

During my years of writing, I have learned that I tend to over think things now and then. I take the littlest assignments and make them really hard and unnecessarily stressful. It’s when I sit down and just do it that I find my best writing.