A Writer in the Making

My email signature says "Briana Morrison- Photographer and Aspiring Writer" but I bet most you didn't know I love to write.  I mean, I'm usually not all that wordy here...but I'm working on it.  Writing has always been a passion of mine, one that I've lost and found again over the years.

When I was a little girl they put me in a special reading class for maybe a year to two.  I was 7 at the time so it's hard to remember exactly how long this class lasted, but I guess I was slow to learn how to read and this class was designed to help bring me up to speed.  I remember that I loved those special reading times and I wasn't in that class for too long before I realized that reading was an amazing thing.  Once this realization took hold I decided I wanted to be a writer and I remember sitting in my 5th grade language arts class desperately trying to write my very first short story that took place in a grave yard with about 6 of my closest friends.  I never did finish that story and in time I gave up on the idea of writing fiction, deeming it too hard because of the vast ammounts of punctuation required to write dialogue.  Because as we all know, punctuation is like the math of writing....and I hate math.

So then in 6th grade I decided to try my hand at writing poetry.  This form of writing soon became my favorite and I continued with it through my high school years.  There is no math to poetry, at least not in my mind.  Writing a poem meant ignoring grammer and proper sentence structure.  I could split up words by lines and decide what punctuation to use, if any at all, just because it felt right.  Boy was I nieve!  True, this was a very raw and primitive type of poetry but it took me a few years to learn that there are many forms of poetry and, in a way, it is the most mathy of writing forms.  Well that was it, I took a creative writing course in college and discovered that in truth, I really didn't like writing poetry at all....and I wasn't much good at it anyway.

In addition to poetry, I started regularly writing in a journal in high school, maybe even middle school.  This was my favorite place to write all my secrets and gush over boys, or bash them when it suited.  I tried to write in it every day, to document my thoughts so that some day someone would read them and discover how profound and amazing I was. (Narcissistic much?)  Well, that seemed like a good place to write until I discovered that my mom had been reading my diary and I got grounded for something I really didn't deserve. (I swear!)

That brings me to here, to now, to this blog.  I discovered blogs in my later college years and thought of them like online diaries where anyone could read your secrets while you remain annonymous.  Since then my ideas about the blogging world have changed emensly and I cherish the idea that a blog is so much more than a diary.  It is a place to share and coverse, a place to create community.

I have always thought of myself as a writer but I realize now, more than ever, how much I have yet to learn.  I am only beginning to find my voice.  Because of this, and because I would like to become a better writer for all of you here, I will be taking Susannah's Blogging From the Heart e-course starting February 27th.  I've taken her Unravelling e-course (around the same time last year) and know that this new class is bound to be absolutely packed full of useful tips and tricks.  I can't wait to share what I've learned with you all!