Nelly Castro

March 10, 2012

English Final

Writing Life Revised

Knowing how to fix your house can also help you fix your own writing without even thinking about it. Hammering your walls can help you see what needs attention, hammering your walls too hard can make them fall down, but not hammering at all won’t ever let you see what your walls have behind them. “The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years’ attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out.” (The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. Pg.4)

Throughout my whole life I was told to keep writing five paragraph essays, these essays were meant to be for my teacher’s enjoinment, rather than mine. I would always have to be pleasing them with my writing in order to get a good grade; it meant that I would have to really know their taste and perspective, in other words I needed it to know “my walls,” in order for me to write a good paper for them. This year though I found something different about my walls. I found out that my strongest points in my writing are own tastes and thoughts, my bearing walls, and actually these walls are for me. These walls are to please me and express what I really want and have to say. Without these walls my writing wouldn’t mean anything or I would of probably had stopped writing at all. Hammering my walls can help me see which walls are strong, which ones I need to keep, or which ones are okay to let fall down. In this metaphor the house is the whole essay, the walls are my essays structure, the bearing walls are my topic sentences and walls that fall down are the paragraphs that don’t have support, hammering will then be the editing process. I had to get to college to see that deep inside and after bad writing habits, such as pleasing teachers and not me I can still be a good writer.

This metaphor really makes me think about my whole writing life. During my k-12 education I learned how to write basic essays and at many of them I couldn’t even express what I wanted to say. I would write and at the end I didn’t even know what the point of the paper was, I was always scared to hammer my walls. I would not want to see any of my walls fall down because that would mean losing a paragraph, so the only thing I could do was not even touch them, stay away from them. I already knew how to use my walls, how not to touch them and just use them for my paper, for my writing and at the same time it would get me good grades. At the beginning of the quarter, Ginger taught me to hammer other walls, and knock them down to see what was in there, or what was really holding them for me.

When I read this metaphor it just really hit me and I thought of myself, I thought of how I used to write and I would just be trapped within my walls. I was always scared to explore new writing techniques and to write something that would actually mean something to me. The first time I wrote for this class was answering the question if I liked to write and I remember saying that I did, but only letters because they don’t have to be formal. Today I can say that I feel a little more confident about writing a paper but I still need to keep working on it. I need to keep checking my walls and I know what to listen for, I know what I should look for in order to become a better writer.

It’s important to know how to hammer my walls to become a good writer, I know that it is not an easy task but once you do it once, it will only keep getting easier or more doable. It’s been two quarters since I’ve been trying to improve and get better with the hammering of my walls, with my writing, and I’ve learned a lot, but certainly not enough. It is just the beginning of a new writing journey, a better one, and more professional. I know that these new techniques will stay with me for the rest of my life, so it’s good to learn and keep improving every day and every time I write a paper, in fact I’m doing it right now. It’s so much that I’ve learned and I never realized it until now that I’m thinking about it.

I know that I still have a lot to work on, that I am not the best writer but I can see that I’ve improved a lot. I still have to work on my exordium and actually everything, but hooking up the reader to my writing its quite hard for me, sometimes I feel like what I write calls my attention but that is because it’s a piece that belongs to me, and I’m interested on the subject. I promise I’m not lying to you ginger, and plus if I were to lie I would actually be lying to myself and fooling my own brain.

Hammering sounds like something that needs a lot of energy and of course strength, that’s exactly how I see my writing now. I have to put energy to it, I have to be strong about it and I have to look for my weak walls and my bearing walls. Once I find my bearing walls I can hold on to them and make them useful for me and my writing. They are like the roots to my writing and from them something good can grow. But now I challenge you, next time you’re working on your house try to relate the process to your own writing, and after you fixed your house go write and try to fix your writing.