ELANA FOGEL

When I was in elementary school I wrote a 42-page novel about a talking dog. It was written in a small spiral bound journal that had a light brown velvet cover with a picture of a dog etched onto the front. I have distinct memories of taking it out of my cubby in the music room to show people. I was so proud.  

 

In middle school, I had a notebook designated for sleepaway camp where I would write down anything important that I needed to remember. I have lyrics to bunk songs, phone numbers and email addresses, pages upon pages of inside jokes that I dare never to forget, and entries about different activities.   

 

I also had a composite notebook for poetry. I colored in the front of the black and white cover with different color sharpie to bring more life to what would otherwise resemble a school notebook. I don’t remember being very poetic or introspective but I wrote a lot about my feelings and what was happening in the world around me.

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In 8th grade I kept a detailed journal of my class trip to Israel in 8th grade. Every single day I wrote where we traveled, what we ate, who I roomed with. I wanted to preserve the memories right as they happened.

 

In high school, this kind of creative writing stopped. I just wrote essays -- so many essays. I wrote essays for my classes, for programs I applied to. I wrote essays in Hebrew and in English. I wrote in class essays and take home essays. Senior year, my essays were mostly in the form of college applications. I wrote essay upon essay, staring mindlessly at the same words, hoping I had come up with a way to make it better. It didn’t matter what I wanted to write, rather what all 13 of the schools that I applied to wanted to read.  

 

In a very practical sense, all writing is about creating and archiving information. Every piece of writing aims to capture a memory or a moment in time. But all the things I’ve written that were for fun, are fundamentally different types of writing than things I wrote for school. But what’s ironic, despite all the writing that I just detailed, is my initial reaction to the prompt was: I don’t write. I’m not a writer.