Writing Wizard

I have a love/hate relationship with showing my writing to other people. Sometimes I’ve written a blog post or poem or essay that I really want someone to read, and sometimes I never want another person’s eyes to see the disaster I just created. Occasionally, I’ll write only for myself, things too private to share with others. But since most of my writing is academic, I often end up showing it to others- professors for grading, friends for critiquing, and classmates for editing.

I’ve been taught the importance of peer editing ever since middle school. I remember when we would sit in groups of four, our desks pulled forward to form awkward circles, and passed our papers to the left. Or sometimes to the right, if we felt like shaking it up a bit. We had to edit with pen- pencil wasn’t allowed. We were supposed to look for grammar and formatting mistakes. In middle school papers, there were quite a lot of those. My teacher had a specific system with different shaped squiggles and slashes for specific mistakes: circling letters that should be capitalized, underlining misspelled words, etc. I won’t bore you with the details. But the point is, that’s where I first learned how helpful peer editing could be. Other people see mistakes in your writing that you would miss otherwise. We can be blind to our own typos and mess-ups.

High school taught me more nuanced forms of editing: looking for the flow of paragraphs, topic sentences, evidence for theses, correct citations, and other complicated things. While it was difficult at first, editing others’ papers helped me be able to edit my own far more objectively and concisely. And giving my paper to others allowed me to access feedback that I desperately needed, and tips I may not have thought about. A lot of the things I learned from peer editing groups in high school, I regularly use now in college.

However, that’s just the academic side of things. Showing my creative writing to people has always been far more difficult. For one thing, judgement seems a lot more harsh when it’s your heart and soul and ideas poured onto a piece of paper as opposed to just a response to a prompt. For another thing… I rarely have a substantial amount of creative writing to show anyone these days. With the large amounts of academic writing I’ve had to do for school, my time for writing creatively has dwindled to almost nothing. Whenever I do have a bit of time to write on my own, it’s usually plot outlining that no one sees, because it’s so rough and unedited, or a blog post that is immediately posted without any time for extensive review, because there are deadlines. I haven’t written a story and showed it to someone since November of 2018 when I tried and failed to complete NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I really need to try and make more time to write creatively, and share it with others.

All things considered, I think that everyone should share their writing with someone. Who they share it with depends on the type of writing. If it’s a personal poem, share it with someone close to you. If it’s an essay, share it with a classmate. Feedback, constructive criticism and validation are all very important for any writer, and you can only do so much by yourself.

On any list about comfort foods, you can bet that macaroni and cheese will make the top ten. It’s warm, cheesy, gooey, filling, reminds people of their childhood- it ticks off any and all boxes for comfort food that could be ticked. But, such a simple recipe inevitably inspires many variations. From the boxed Kraft mac and cheese to fancy baked six-cheese versions, everyone has their own. This post is to argue about the process of my simple, three-ingredient mac and cheese with an uncommon ingredient, and why it is the best option.

This version is simple to make due to its small number of ingredients, and the short time it takes to cook. All you need is some pasta (any kind of macaroni will work), some cheese (I prefer to cut some cheddar cheese) and the unusual ingredient: a can of tomato sauce.

Now, hear me out. I can already hear my friends’ noises of disgust at the mention of tomato. A lot of people don’t like it. Mostly, the idea of tomato in macaroni and cheese sounds disgusting, or at least unusual. But trust me when I say it’s actually really good. It doesn’t taste out of place or clash with the cheesiness or anything. The flavors meld together very well and balance each other out.

But back to the process of making it. Again, it’s very simple.

1. Cook the pasta. You should know how to do this; boil some water in a pot, put the noodles in, stir occasionally, take them out when they’re al dente (soft on the outside, but still slightly firm on the inside. Make sure you don’t let them get soggy, but don’t under-cook them either. If the noodles crunch, they’re not done).
2. While the pasta is cooking, chop up some cheese. Cheddar is best, but other kinds can be fine too. There isn’t any specific ratio to use here, it’s simply according to taste and how cheesy you want your pasta to be.
3. Drain the pasta and then put it immediately back in the warm pot (off the heat though so the noodles don’t burn). Then put the cheese you chopped into the pot, stir it in, and put the lid on the pot to trap the heat into it. The heat from the pasta will make the cheese melt, so leave it for five-ten minutes to allow that to happen. Feel free to add more cheese if it turns out you didn’t chop enough.
4. Stir the pasta and the cheese together, then leave it to stick together for a couple of minutes while you grab the tomato sauce. If you add the sauce in too soon, then the cheese will pull away from the noodles which makes an unpleasant, grainy texture.
5. Add the tomato sauce. Again, it depends on how much you’re making: when I make it for about seven people I generally use the whole can, but feel free to go heavy or light on the tomato. Either way, the whole thing should have a reddish-orangeish tint and look gooey and cheesy.
6. Eat! It’s not allowed to get cold. Eat it while it’s still warm. Have one bowl, maybe two. You know you want it. Treat yourself. It’s good.

This is how to make the best macaroni and cheese you will ever eat. Trust me- it’s that good. I mean, all mac and cheese is good, but this stuff is top tier. A can of tomato sauce will take one of the best foods ever and make it heavenly. So enjoy!

It’s hard for me to feel successful when I write.

When I was a little kid, I would always love the things I’d written. At every word of praise coaxed from my mother, I would glow; at every time I made my cousins laugh, I would shine with pride. I was convinced that I was the best writer ever, and that everything I wrote was great. I knew that once I grew up, I would write the best books ever written, and everyone would love them too.

Then, the doubt set in.

It started first with being compared to my sisters and cousins. I used to illustrate my books when I wrote them, because I enjoyed drawing almost as much as writing. But as my younger sister and my two cousins began to put more time into art, I started to feel inferior. They would nitpick things about my drawings, tell me what I’d done wrong, and as much as I would try to fix it, the criticism kept coming. Or worse, they’d smile vapidly and tell me it was great while sketching their own amazing piece of art and not giving mine a second glance. We had art contests sometimes, and I would always lose. My desire to draw tapered off until it was almost nonexistent, and I turned to just writing instead. But even then, the doubt of others being better had been put into my mind.

Then, I went to school. Middle school, where any sort of pride and joy I took in my writing was taken for bragging, and any sort of leadership or proactiveness I displayed was taken as bossiness. My peers were the instigators of this, not my teachers- their criticism and praise were always earned and appreciated. But children take to heart the words of their friends, and as my skills were casually maligned I stopped taking as much pride in my work. I stopped writing for fun as often as I used to, both for lack of time and lack of desire. I stopped showing my writing to people. I still loved to write, but I never felt like it was good enough. I would never finish projects I’d started. I doubted my own capabilities to even put the story that I wanted on paper. The few times I would show things to people, I would either get some praise (which I would smile at but then forget or assume was insincere), some criticism (which I would take to heart and add in, but wish for a few kind words as well), or worse, an incredulous look or laughter at some mistake I’d made. Most crushing of all was complete indifference, the most common response. I would anxiously send a draft of some creative writing piece to a friend, only to have the email sit unopened in their inbox for an entire semester.

Those were the things that slowly began my self doubt, which manifested itself not only in writing, but soon in physical appearance, intelligence, and any other category I’d once taken pride in. Art was long forgotten, and I’ve still never found the courage or desire to pick it back up again. Writing slowed, joy dimmed, and all thoughts of confidence were left behind in the dust. I would still write, but whenever I made a mistake or couldn’t progress further, the depression would set in and tell me I wasn’t good enough to continue. So I didn’t.

The doubt still lives in me, no matter how hard my boyfriend and friends and I try to work on it. College has been helpful so far: the independence and responsibility have assisted my taking charge of myself and my passions. As much as I am improving, though, it is slow work. On one day I may look in the mirror and feel proud of myself for all I’ve done. The next day I’ll glance in and feel a strong surge of shame in my reflection. Knowing I hadn’t done enough, I didn’t look good enough, I wasn’t smart enough. Days alternate, and I’m steadily getting better… but no one can recover instantly or completely from the dark pit of doubt.

My doubt is holding my mind hostage, and regaining control will take a long time.

With that being said, I have been able to find some small success in pieces that I write. A well-crafted sentence that brings a vivid image to mind will make me smile. Compliments on a concise article, an A on a paper I’d struggled over, excitement at the beginnings of a story… all of these bring some small vestige of success to me. These things make me feel happy. I know that I worked to achieve them. However, I have yet to be truly successful: to write an entire book and have it be loved.

I don’t need it to be popular. I don’t need it to be famous. I don’t need to be rich. If one person can honestly say that they love the book I’ve published, that it has inspired them, that they want to read more, I will feel like I have been successful. For me, part of the joy in creation is sharing my love of a story with others. Once I can do that, once I can put one of my novels to paper and have someone else enjoy it as much as I had, then I will finally know success.

I’ve never been a big fan of the idea of an “audience,” especially for writing. I loved to sing when I was a kid, but I would always get stage fright singing in front of someone else. Similarly, I didn’t like showing my writing to a lot of other people, because then they would inevitably judge it and make me feel self-conscious. I thought that I could just write for myself and never need to think about an audience. But as much as I love writing only for myself, I tend to do most of my writing for school- either papers for a teacher, or posts on this blog. Teachers are definitely an audience; which of us can truly say they’ve never specifically written some part of an assignment with exactly their teacher’s preferences in mind? However, I never thought much about audience until I began to write this blog.

When I saw on our class syllabus that we were required to write a blog, my first thought was of audience. I would be putting my writing out on the internet for everyone to see- not only my classmates and friends, but potentially complete strangers who would know nothing about me. Nothing but what I told them, and what they discerned through my writing. That was kind of frightening to me. How did I write to them? What kind of audience were they? I had literally no idea. Really, I still don’t. Mostly, right now, my audience is my classmates and my teacher. I have somewhat of an idea of how to write for them- write to the rubric for my teacher, write something interesting and funny for my classmates to comment on. That’s about as much consideration as I ever put into my audience, at least until we started talking about it in class.

We read two articles, “The Writer’s Audience is Always Fiction” and “Closing My Eyes As I Speak”. In the second one, the writer (Peter Elbow) discussed how audiences, whether they’re imagined or right in front of us, can often distract or confuse our writing. That has often been the case with me. I wrote a short story for my younger sisters once, and it was jumbled and confusing because I didn’t know how to write to them or what they’d like to read. Since audiences were hard for me to write to, I usually ignored them altogether and just wrote for myself. However, that won’t always be possible. if I continue with my dream of wanting to be an author, audience will become a much more important thing to me. They’re the people who will read my books, critique them, edit them, decide if they’re good enough to be sold, buy them, etc. I will need to deliberately write something they would like to read, otherwise I won’t be able to publish or profit off of my work.

As much as a writer can choose to write for themselves, an author doesn’t have that privilege. And if that’s what I’m planning to be, I’ll need to start putting much more thought into my audience than I do currently.