Tiger PAWS Spring 2018

or polished enough. It came down to forcing him to push through and write. My sister and I were recruited to spur him on to write better and more, or just more.

As we all sat down to write, our notebook paper clean and fresh, I could feel my stomach sink like a stone. I have never been good at coming to terms with my weaknesses. The idea of seeing my terrible scribbles out on the page filled me with dread. The instructions were to write until the timer ran out. My mother loves to write, so when the timer started, she was off like a jet. Writing swiftly and skillfully, she wrote a full page before I had two words. As the minute came to a close, all I had written was two and a half lines. Luckily, I was not the only one struggling. My siblings and fellow writing students had written the same amount. This was the beauty of the system; my mother served as an example of what we needed to strive for, and we served as support for one another, mirroring each other at the same level, far from that of our juggernaut, writing-boss of a mom.

Every day was the same: sit down, write for a minute, stop, and read what we had written. Some days my father would participate.

He provided a second example, a contrast to our passionate, writewhat-you-feel mother. He was by-the-book, calm, and methodical.

Soon my writing became longer and more articulate. Each time I wrote I told myself, “Do not worry about if it sounds bad or if there are mistakes. You can fix it later. Just write,” words my mother had said to all of us over and over again. Finally, it came time for my brother to take the SAT. All of the hard work and practice paid off.

He pushed through his urge to erase and just wrote. Then, a year later it was time for me to use the tools I had learned to pass the TSI essay. Through repetition and writing with the motto of “write now, edit later,” I was able to pass the TSI. To me, the challenge is to understand that writing is a process, both in the course of a person’s life and through an individual writing assignment. One time my family went to the beach. We met a man who made beautiful sandcastles. He told us how to build them: “Pile the wet sand on, lots of it, maybe much more than you will have in the finished product. Then, start to scrape and shape the sand bit by bit, making what was once a formless mound of sand into a unique piece of art, which shows your personality and skill.” Sometimes we want to pile up sand and have a perfect sandcastle in front of us without all the trouble, the getting our hands dirty, the mess of it all.

69 Writing is like building sandcastles. Sometimes we want to write and magically have a finished project, but instead we must trust the process and let it teach us how to be the writers we need to be.