Julia R. Smith

Why I Write was our first assignment as writing minors and a chance to explore how we thought of writing and how we thought of ourselves as writers. The goal was to discover our core identity as writers. In order to complete the assignment, I decided to approach it from a retrospective viewpoint by trying to identify certain stages or incidents that defined who I was as a writer at any given age. By tracking this evolution, I hoped to discover where I was currently and how I'd gotten there. In an attempt to track this process, I came up with the idea of writing a series of letters from my past selves at various ages, explaining what they were doing and why they were doing it. The idea was that this would force me to delve into the mindset of my younger selves and really connect with their (now extinct) thought processes. It soon became apparent that this would not work as smoothly as I'd hoped. The letters, while imaginative, sounded stilted, and my younger voices came off as forced and archetyple. I had created idealized, phony versions of my younger selves. I considered giving up on the idea all together and just writing a traditional essay, but instead I tried switching the viewpoints of the letters. Instead of writing them from my past selves, I wrote them to my past selves, with my current voice. This choice really cleared up the issue of voice while still allowing me to reflect back on key incidents in my life as a writer. It also provided more of a unifying link between each letter and made the essay as a whole seem a lot less forced.