Assignment 1: Task 1

Thus, a writer was born.

All throughout high school, I’d been hell-bent on becoming an artist. It was all I could think about. I would fill sketchbooks and journals with little doodles of bodies and faces; occasionally I’d create some little monster that didn’t make any sense, like a crab with eight eyes and bat wings, or a flamingo with fangs and a fish tail. I thought they were cute, but my teachers didn’t think much of my creations. They would constantly tell me that I was wasting my time on ridiculous dreams; no one becomes an artist drawing creatures like that. My year 9 art teacher believed in me though. She thought I had an interesting imagination; told me not to listen to anyone or anything but my own heart. She was a little kooky, but in a good way; in a way that made me think I really could do anything I set my mind to.

I’d spend hours drawing and painting, sometimes even during classes. It was all I wanted to do. I kept imagining my little monsters hung up all giant on a wall in a gallery, next to some famous artist like Vincent Van Gogh or Andy Warhol. People would be lining up out the door to get a glimpse of my work, and I’d become one of the most well-known artists in the world. I’d get to rub it in the faces of all the people who said I couldn’t never make something of myself with art like that, and it would be glorious.

Over the next few years, as I headed into VCE, I began to get more serious about my work. I had to ‘knuckle down’, as my mum would say. Art took a bit of a backseat to other classes because I had to work harder to get my grades up, but it was still one of my VCE studies. I would spend all of my spare time in the art studio, along with a couple of other art students who were behind on work. I’d never let anyone see the monsters I was working on for my finals, because they were some of my best work, and I wanted it to be a surprise. When they were finally displayed at the end-of-year gallery at school, I was so excited to unveil the works and show my family and friends. I had been so excited and shaky that I almost couldn’t do it. The reaction was…the nicest way to put it would be underwhelming. Some of my friends had even laughed at the works, asking if they were meant to be satirical, or fake ‘bad art’. I’d been devastated and cried for days. My parents were no help. You know when you were young, and you’d show your parents something you were really excited about, only for their reaction to be completely nonchalant? It was that kind of feeling, but tenfold. I’d lost my motivation for everything. Art was my life; without it, what was I?

It took months before I would even go near a brush again, let alone actually make something with it. In the time between the devastating reveal and now, I was doing very little with myself. It was mostly just four months of watching tv and reading. At one point, I decided I had to do something with myself. Since my plan to apply for arts courses was destroyed by my year 12 final, I wasn’t going to university, and so, in order to keep myself going, I decided to make a list of everything I had wanted to do or see or read, and do, see, and read those things. The very first thing on that list was to properly clean my room. I wanted to completely empty it of anything that would make me feel worse; I put my art supplies in storage and hid away all of my sketchbooks, I threw out clothes that made me feel awful, and I got rid of anything that I hadn’t used in the last year. In the process of all of this chaos, I found diaries and schoolwork from when I was in early high school. In amongst all of the mess of maths homework and diary entries about cute boys in my class, I found poems. Most of them were pretty terrible, but I came across a few that I really liked. Seeing my old writing gave me an idea, and I was finally able to get out of my funk about not being able to make decent art.

I picked up a pen and just started writing, before I knew it, I had filled an entire journal with poems, and short stories, and ideas for longer novels. I hadn’t realised any of this was in me; I completely forgot about my love of writing after I’d discovered the wonders of watercolour. It was like I was becoming an entirely new person, one who actually knew what she wanted and what she was good at. I wasn’t entirely sure yet though, and so I tested it. I typed up one of my poems and printed it off to show to my mother. I didn’t tell her who wrote it, so her reaction would be genuine, and she was blown away. It didn’t take long for her to realise that this was something I could actually do with myself, and so together we looked into courses, and thus, a writer was born.

Framing Statement: I wrote this piece in a bit of a hurry (procrastination/disorganisation central right here) and so I am well aware of the fact that it's not my best work, but I was inspired by a comment my interview partner made about the fact that they originally wanted to be an artist, but realised they weren't good at art, and so looked to writing instead. Parts of this are my own personal experience as well, so it's a sort of fiction/non-fiction mash, which likely doesn't make a lot of sense. I found the interview process quite simple and helpful, especially since I didn't realise how much inspiration I would actually get from it.