I have just finished writing my Literacy Narrative. At last, all the words are grouped together, the paragraphs are in the right order, my ideas are expressed and the emotions I wished to convey are sitting in wait for a reader. Like a proud and weary mother, the first thing I’ll do is share the link:
https://thesecretlanguageofsabrina.home.blog/the-one-story-i-have-never-told/
Please, feel free to go to that directly, seeing as I can vouch for its content, while I still have no idea what I’ll say in this reflection post, which I find fitting considering I had no idea that my Literacy Narrative would come to life in the way it did until we did a free writing exercise in class.
I am still amazed at the things that can come from free-writing!
As I mention in my Narrative, I have a terrible memory. One of my first poems was called I am Afraid, and it was about my inability to remember even things that are important. So I should mention that the things I talk about in my Narrative are events that hadn’t crossed my mind for years.
Yet somehow, when we were told to write ten memories related to learning to read or write, it popped into my head. Of course, the first time I wrote a story of my own. But then we were asked about the sounds, feeling, our surrounding, and I was immersed so completely, that I really felt like I was an eleven year old in Medellin, Colombia, approaching a blank screen for the first time.
Once I remembered so vividly, I could picture it all in my head (I’ll be honest, I already have some ideas on how I want to adapt it to a comic). This in particular was breath-taking considering my memory is never up for such precise details from nearly a decade ago.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about this, it’s that free-writing is a tool that I seriously underutilize. Hopefully, I’ll fix that for future writing occasions.
The post about this post (wow, post about this post, writing about writing…), told us to mention a quote we think will most stand out in our Literacy Narrative. I went ahead and italicized it just because it was so important to me:
The book did not exist because I had not yet written it.
Though personally, I’m also a fan of my final line (one that I always strive to make impactful in anything I’m writing):
And once I started, I never stopped.
Every time I write, I come up with these kinds of phrases or words that I hadn’t thought of before. It’s like in my post where I talk about my avatar, I expect to be surprised, and it’s one of the things I enjoy the most about what I do.
The Secret Language of Sabrina 