Arctic Beetle

I cannot say I entirely like the style I write with now. But if I have to tell something about it sans the hesitation and reluctance, it is the most satisfactory among the several ones I tried to put on.

My deal with writing began on my second to last year in grade school, all due to the dire need to fill up our school’s roster of participants to the division journalism competition. Primitive (but non-vague) classifications dictated that only two expressive styles exist then: the grammatically-correct and the isn’t. The former is necessarily the best and the same pedestal could be reached by anyone if and only if the latter is to be remedied. Via the essay my mother wrote at home and asked me to transcribe exactly at the tryouts, I got my way through the roster as the contestant to the category Editorial Writing. For about two years, I made my journalism adviser think it was me who penned all those training exercises. Though the actual competition is spontaneous, I always came out unharmed because I knew the content of the sample articles believed to be mine word per word and down right to the comma placement. Shame and quite a luck too that I was awarded as one of the 2005 Outstanding Campus Journalists of the country. Personally, I wouldn’t call that writing but if contemporary times would permit, then that would be the closest feel I had with producing literary works back then.

Superficially, because Sarah — not my mother — is supposedly good at writing, I still trailed after it with hopes that I could live up to the accolades behind me without anyone masking as my face. The attempts were atrocious, almost desperate. From being a criterion, grammar turned to be a given order in any literary product. There emerged the simplistic style found on my old Blogger, the a modicum of depth style found on Arctic Beetle numero uno, the subtle and colloquially-speaking, emo style found on my Livejournal and lastly Arctic Beetle numero dos, which is an assortment of all mentioned plus the weak humour. Each was based on the different blogs I follow and I appropriately call myself as a writer lacking individuality. The current Arctic Beetle is suspended between the impression of she-writes-okay-but-is-forgettable and she-writes-well-and-remarkably-too. It leans on the first, I think.

So.. it goes without saying that improvement should have tagged along all this time. It did and on the contrary, I received it warmly. Although it is gratifying, the thought of dismissing my previous works, which at the beginning I thought were all brilliant, from among my cremes is depressing to take in. In hindsight, I may have overrated them or maybe not. My compositions from before offered more content and substance, while the current rivets more on the aesthetic presentation of the same meaty thoughts. I believe mine must fall in the equilibrium between the two but for the lack of practice, I never seem to get the exact mixture right.

I took Creative Writing 10 last semester thinking it would help me in deciding on which style to write with. It was boring, really. The writing exercises weren’t the type that would get your train of thought to travel aimlessly. Well, of course, except for the last which was freestyle. By the time the last requirement was revealed, ironically, it was then that I lost all my big ideas and enthusiasm. During the day of its submission, as a final act of desperation, my final manuscript document suddenly had words from a composition I wrote a year ago. I could have done better — no something, I told myself before submitting the recycled work. However, apparently, as remarked by my professor, it is the best among what I could have submitted. No, she didn’t say it directly but that’s the best my mind could reconcile when she asked me whether she could publish my work on a compilation. I don’t believe it either but she did. Totally against what I expected, the experience actually muddled my mind further.  It was my fault but the manga I was reading that night was just too nice to be put away for a school requirement. It’s probably the greatest accomplishment so far of the writer in me from a year ago.

In the end, though I was told several times by my English teachers to end everything with a bang, I’m not gonna close this post with a decisive conclusion. The best I can do for now, I guess, is to write with few grammatical errors.