A Memoir on my Reading and Writing

My earliest memories of reading and writing are of lessons that I can barely remember. Sitting in a classroom at a very young age and learning my ABC's, how to diagram a sentence, and proper grammar use. I went to a Catholic grade school. My spelling lessons were taught by an elderly nun. I probably spent just as much time trying to figure out what that oddly dressed woman was all about as I did studying the words she wrote on the board.
My elementary school was a very rigid entity. Lessons were presented to us and it was our role as students to soak up as much of the knowledge as possible. There were some teachers who made learning a chore, but there were others made it fun. I remember English class being the same set of lessons grade after grade. We would be assigned stories out of a text book. We would have a certain amount of reading due for the next class. When a story was completed we would have a set of questions that needed to be answered. The questions were designed to reward you with a good grade if you knew what happened and punish you with a bad grade if you were not able to follow the plot. The classes were always divided into two groups. One group would talk about the reading while the other group has assigned work to get through. At some point the groups would switch. We had the Book It program, which was the only reason we had for reading whole novels, other than reading for personal enlightenment. However, a lot of us had sports and Nintendo games that we played with when weren't in school. In that environment it is easy for one to develop a nasty habit of reading only what is necessary to and then indulging on friends and media when the lessons are over.
Around the end of elementary school I would write a short story of my own from time to time. The first time was in March of 1993. The reason I remember the date is because it was the year there was a huge blizzard in Pittsburgh. My family always goes to the St. Patrick's Day parade, but we didn't that year (also the only year we haven't) because of the huge amount of snow that hit Pittsburgh. Instead, I was trapped in the house with my family while the snow piled up outside. For whatever reason, instead of honing my skills at Super Mario Brothers 3, I picked up a small red notebook and started to write. I spent most of the weekend in my room writing a story. I don't remember what the story was about, but I was intensely focused on it during that weekend and through the follow snow days that kept us out of school. My friends came over or I would go to their houses or we would be outside shoveling snow off of sidewalks and flinging it at each other, but for a couple of hours each day I wrote in that notebook. I wish I could remember what the story was about.
In my high school English classes I began to read at a little more depth. We read a lot of novels. We had several novels assigned to us as summer reading. I remember feeling discouraged over having to read so many pages. Some novels ended up being surprisingly enjoyable and others a huge bore. We always wrote reports. We practiced the five paragraph essay from Freshman year through Senior year. We wrote about novels or plays, but occasionally we could do a report on a film or a television show. My Sophomore year I had an American Literature class where we watched an episode of the Simpsons and wrote an essay on it. The reading I did in high school was focused on the Western Canon, but to be more specific, British and American works. We read Shakespeare, Chauser, Dickens, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingwey, Steinbeck, and others. In high school, the primary lesson I learned about reading were that it took a lot of concentration to get through. Literature was thick with words and events I knew little about. Every now and then an unusual word would appear. A familiar word from the vocabulary lessons that were being drilled into our memories for the sake of better SAT scores. It was fun to see it appear in context. Little things like recognizing an unusual word were fun to me. I may not have had command of Hemingwey but I was learning a new vocabulary.
In high school I had inherited my sister's word processor to write my reports on. The computer we got went into her room, because she was in college and had more prestigious use for the machine. I had the word processor with no internet and no gaming ability for my room. It was adequate for writing my papers. It worked well for writing stories. At some point over the summer, when friends were away on vacations or working summer jobs, I would find myself at home alone. Every now and then I would go back to writing stories. It was as much out of boredom as it was out of some passion for writing. I remember one story about a solider at the D-Day invasion during WWII. I wrote another about a kid on summer vacation. Nothing too epic, just stories where things happened to people. I didn't think that things like an antagonist, conflict, a tone or even an ending needed to be put into a story. It was my assumption that if you just sat down and wrote, those elements would just work themselves in to piece. I never even realized my stories needed those elements, because I never showed my stories to anyone. They read fine to me and it wasn't my intention to present them in any form. I never did any revisions. Half the time I never even finished the story.
In college I became a lot more interested in reading on my own. I was still in the canon. It was still very difficult to get through the language. When I did understand what was going on beyond the plot that understanding (sometimes not until months after I finished the novel) I felt personally empowering. I educated myself outside of anyone else's lessons. I pushed myself into knowledge, I wasn't lead there by anyone else's expectations.
My writing was over three different areas. I wrote fiction for my creative writing and fiction classes. This was the first time I would share my work with anyone else. It wasn't as difficult as I expected. A lot of times other people's stories were just as bad as mine. Grammatically bad, I mean. However I was not feeling as passionate about my stories as I felt I should be. It was discouraging to write creatively for the sake of a lesson. I felt that if I was going to feel anything about my writing I had to be doing it for myself. I was writing essays for my History classes, which largely concentrated on answering one of several essay questions. I wrote in some variation of the five paragraph essay structure and rarely felt inspired enough to offer any uniquely brilliant answers. I did what was expected of me to get the assignment done. I wrote on my own very seldomly. I was writing so much during the months I was in class that when I didn't have any assignments I didn't want to sit in front of the computer screen. So I read, but I also worked a lot.
Today, I have come back to writing fiction, but at a limited capacity. I think I have a couple ideas I can turn into books. I work on something for a couple nights over a week or two and then not even look at it again for months. In between I chat and debate through email. I have recognized I take away more pleasure from writing when I am not working towards a grade. When I do it on my own. I concentrate less on form, I am able to push out ideas at more depth. Those early vocab and grammar lessons allow me to communicate, but I find myself constantly having to confirm definition and rules even years later. My interests in reading and writing have gone through periods of heavy study and periods where I lost almost all interest. I expect things to continue along those lines. I have several ideas for entertaining stories. If I develop my ideas enough I could probably turn them into a couple of novels, but at the pace I have been going that won't happen until years from now. It is not my desire to become an accomplished novelist. I just have some ideas I want to get out of my head. Once they are out, why not see if anyone wants to buy them?