Hi. My name is Clarence Stone, and I have always liked to write. It allowes me to put the ideas in my head into actual words on paper. It blew my mind when I realized what writing allowed me to do. All these ideas, and suddenly I was able to put them away somewhere other than my mind.

 

Well, let’s not act like you actually enjoyed writing until I came along. Hello everyone, I’m CJ Stone.

 

Hey! No one said you could talk! This is an academic essay. We both know that when it comes to writing analysis, I am the one that is supposed to do the explaining.

 

See, we are analyzing ourselves though. It’s an analysis of how we have grown as a writer, right? So you can’t just act like I don’t exist for this project. I am just as important as you are.

 

Fine. We should probably stop confusing the poor people reading this as well. Let’s start over. Hi. My name is Clarence Stone. I am the left brain version of Clarence J. Stone, the person who’s essay you are currently reading. I am the part of him that does the problem solving, that helps to clarify statements through facts and logic. I try to be as explanatory as possible when it comes to writing. And believe me, I know what you’re reading probably sounds a tad insane. If I had my way, this would be as strictly academic as we could possibly get, and this would be presented as a straightforward essay.

 

However, due to the nature of this topic, that isn’t exactly possible. Hi everyone, my name is CJ Stone. I am the right brain version of Clarence J. Stone. I am the part of him that is more creative, and allows him to imagine. I try to make anything that he creates as vivid as possible. Since this essay is an analysis of his writing over the past 4 years, I am just as important as my left brain counterpart. As you will find out, I was needed to make writing more enjoyable and meaningful as he continued through his studies. Personally, I think some of the best writing we have done has been when I was involved.

 

Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,  I’ve liked writing since I was young. Once I realized I could put my thoughts on paper, I started to do it frequently. There was just something engaging about creating something from the multiple ideas that CJ constantly imagined.

 

I’ve got to give him credit, Clarence turned the crazy ideas I constantly came up with into actual readable content. It allowed us to clear our head. Not to mention it always felt rewarding. I enjoyed it so much, that for the majority of my elementary and middle school life, I wanted to do it professionally.

 

Then once we got to high school, something stopped. Although, I never had to worry about getting a good grade for any paper I wrote, and many people said that I was indeed a good writer, the idea of writing stopped exciting me. Instead of getting the chance to write out CJs thoughts, I had to start writing purely analytical assignments. It became much more of a chore for me to do.

 

Well, that was your own fault. 

 

How?!

 

You just stopped using me. You were so focused on getting an A, that you didn't care if we were no longer being creative. As long as you got the grade you wanted, you were satisfied. So, we stopped collaborating, and you became bored by the lack of creativity that these assignments generally required. Admit it. Without me without me being involved, writing was not compelling anymore. 

 

Sigh, I guess you're right. When I think about it, once I learned that I was good at writing, I did begin to focus on just getting the grade instead of creating interesting content. However, even I will admit that writing essays examining Julius Caesar and Things Fall Apart, was never something I actively looked forward to doing.

 

That's true. Honestly, even if you wanted me to get involved on assignments like that, I probably wouldn't have helped that much. Those topics just didn't seem as compelling as the stories that I was creating. With those assignments, you wrote about someone else's work, using notes you took in class. In most cases, it was never anything you nor I individually created. Instead it was simply analysis that you were told, reworded into a different piece of work. Thank God it wasn't like that for every class we took in high school.

 

You're talking about AP English and Psychology right? 

 

Yep.

 

Junior year of high school, we took an AP English language class, which primarily focused on writing. This class focused so much on writing that all we really did was write essays that mainly had the topic of our choosing. Instead of writing an essay about this specific topic, we had to write an essay in a different model. One week, we wrote a profile. Another, we wrote a satirical essay about our high school. Then as the year came to an end, we had to write a research paper on the topic of our choice.

 

It was my first chance to write an analysis about something that wasn’t the themes of another authors work. I chose steroids and baseball, and for once in high school, I enjoyed working on an analytical writing assignment.  The following year, the same assignment happened in my psychology class, and I chose video games and violence. Again, I enjoyed working on the essay. It felt rewarding to craft my own analysis, using information that I gathered myself.

 

Not to mention with these topics, I was allowed to roam free and take over some of the writing. Any creative thoughts or ideas I personally had were not only used, but they were analyzed.  These assignments gave me hope that writing in college would not be as torturous and constraining as the majority of high school. This made me believe I would be used a lot more often once we went to college.

 

For the majority of our first two years of college, I was let down by the writing assignments I was required to complete. It turns out that writing about what you are interested in depends on the class. The first essays we wrote were for a class that focused on writing essays using different methods of social science analysis. However, 4 out of our 5 topics weren’t free, and we had to stick to the topics that our professors assigned to us. Most of that wasn’t engaging, and I regressed to doing things myself instead of incorporating CJ.

 

Don't worry, I probably wouldn't have helped with those monotonous assignments anyway. 

 

The one time I was able to pick my own topic was when I got the chance to write an essay using interviews that could be on any social topic we chose. I chose to interview my grandparents about the Detroit Riots in the 1960s. That was enjoyable because I was generating the analysis myself, on a topic I actually cared about. It’s also was the best grade I received in the class.

 

With this paper, I was able to piece the story of the Detroit Riots together through the quotes of my grandparents. It was  like piecing together a puzzle of something I didn’t really understand at that time. While I still had to tell a historically accurate depiction of what happened in the riots, I was able to create tension and deliver a somewhat creative and accurate essay.

 

 

“These riots changed the city. Many people began to feel like it wasn’t safe anymore. Many people began to leave. But many other people stayed, and 40 years later, they can still see the results from the riots.  “As the years have gone on, I’ve felt that it forced a lot of Detroit citizens to abandon the area,” my grandpa Joe told me. “So much property was destroyed, businesses vanished, and really, the power that ran the city, more or less left the city. It became a matter of starting all over, trying to elect the people who would do something to get the city started again.””

 

This was the same case for every almost every class we took. In our introductory communication courses, we had to write uninspiring analytical essays with specific constraints that we had to follow. Out of 7 papers in 3 courses, we were not allowed to write about any topic that genuinely interested us. This ususally meant I was stuck doing all of the work.

 

Hey, at least there was one assignment where we both got involved.

 

You're right. We got the chance to write an analytical essay examining the representation of women in a television series I enjoyed.

 

Again, writing that assignment was actually rewarding. In this essay, I was able to focus on how different characters were depicted, examine the relationships between them, and show how they were different than other representations of women that are seen on TV. Again, this allowed me to be a tad bit more creative, and even let my mind wonder about the future of the series. Writing this assignment started to show me that working with Clarence usually led to interesting results.

 

““Water, earth, fire, air. (DiMartino & Konietzko 2005)” Ask any person who grew up watching Nickelodeon during the mid 2000s and they will likely know the significance of these words.  This was how Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of Nickelodeon’s most popular shows, started. That series took place in a world where people were certain people were able to manipulate the elements of water, earth, fire, and air using a technique known as bending. The show revolved around Aang, the current Avatar, the only person who could use all four elements, and a young Airbender who was the last of his kind due to the war that was started by the Firebenders. Aang had to learn to use water, earth, and fire to bring peace and balance back to the world (DiMartino & Konietzko, 2005).”

 

Luckily, this is how our first year writing class was constructed. The class was called “The Trials and Tribulations of Harry Potter.” Yes, this was a class focused on analyzing the Harry Potter series, the defining series of our childhood. In this class, we got to write the entire time about something that we genuinely loved. For all of our assignments in that class, we were happy to write the write them and didn’t see them as a chore.

 

Our final assignment for this class was a paper explaining why so many people loved the Harry Potter series. Using the same interviewing skills that we learned in our social science writing course, we were able to find themes in many people’s answers. While Clarence used these answers to find patters in answering the question, I used them to depict how deep the connection to the book series was for the readers. The end result was a very rewarding essay, where we created our own analytical content.

 

"For years, fans patiently waited for the next book, then eventually the next movie. It is the series that culturally defined he current generation of teenagers and young adults. But despite all the variety in the answers, the one common factor is that every person will tell you that they gained a personal connection with the series and it will always hold a special place in their heart.

“I legit waited for my letter from Hogwarts. I think I liked the HP books mostly because they seemed so real. Even though he was living in a magical world and his problems were more life or death, I felt like he was goin[g] through the same things that our generation were going through. He had to deal with school, family issues and still fight through his personal battles just like we did and still do. The HP books were kind of a way to escape and figure out how to push through our battles and stay optimistic about our future”"

 

Our sophomore year, I got the chance to fully take control of our writing. I enrolled in a pure creative narration class taught in the RC. It was a class I had wanted to take since I had gotten to Michigan. There was a story that had been forming in my head for years, about 4 friends discovering they had some type of supernatural power, one of them turning out to be evil, and the others having to stop him. Generic, I know, but it felt great to get the chance to write this. Over the span of the semester, I ended up writing a 12-chapter book involving this topic. It was fun, but way more challenging than I expected. I realized that when it came to creative writing, fleshing out the ideas in your head without any structure is surprisingly hard when you don’t really have any experience doing so. By the time I finished, I was proud of my work, but I realized that having a tad bit more structure on what I was writing, instead of complete and utter freedom made writing much more easy.

 

You should have let me get involved. I could have restructured the story to allow for more character development.

 

I know, I know. Next time we write a fictional story, I will let you look things over before we say it's done. 

 

While my enjoyment of writing for all of these classes waxed and waned, there was something that was consistent throughout all of these assignments. Regardless of how CJ or I felt about the topics of the individual essays, we were in fact somewhat decent writers. After our first writing course, we never received anything lower than a B on a paper. In other words, writing was not only something that we didn’t mind doing, it was a skill that we knew we should develop. This lead us to apply for the minor in writing our junior year.

 

Our first assignment for the writing minor showed us that applying for the minor was a good decision. The “Why I Write” essay made us think about our purpose behind writing, and it addressed why we liked writing. It allowed us to tell stories.

 

“I’m going to be very straightforward with this, I write to tell stories. I tell stories because I’m always thinking about them.”

 

When I think about it, that explained why I found  specific essays more rewarding than others. The essays that gave me a little more freedom with a topic allowed me to tell more of a story. It might not have been a story in the traditional sense, but in analyzing certain topics, I was still telling the story of how something did something else. In the essays that limited me in the storytelling aspect of writing, I was bored. Telling a story let CJ help out as well

 

In other words, we realized that in order for us to truly enjoy writing an essay, we both had to be involved. For me, if I wasn’t given any structure as to guide me, things became difficult because Clarence never showed up to help. Without his guidance, my thoughts tended to become scatterbrained and not focus on a specific topic. For writing to be rewarding, we needed to be both creative and structured. Although it didn’t address the need for structure directly, “Why I Write” showed me that.

 

“…I realized I still liked telling stories, but it was more fun to tell ones that were actually true. I realized that through my words, I could take subject, mold it into an image and present it in the best possible way. By doing that, I could present something in a different light, in my own personal way”

 

As our writing in the minor went on, I also realized that our storytelling and teamwork still needed work.

 

You can say that again! There were times where I knew I should contribute more, but you wouldn't let me.

 

That's because when I did, sometimes you would go off on random tangents, which would in turn give us more work. 

 

Yeah, well there were other times where you would get to the point so quickly, we woudln't have a chance build the story either. 

 

Either way, we quickly learned that true story writing was not easy. In both our gateway course, and our English 325 course, creative non-fiction, we never quite crafted our assignments the way we truly wanted.

 

In most cases, I was happy with the result, but I never fully got to the point where I wanted to go. That might simply be because a writer is never satisfied with his final project, but every time I thought I had gotten to the point where I wanted to be, my professors showed me there was still room for improvement. After reading over what I wrote a second time, I saw that it was clear that I still needed to make changes. While getting my ideas out was easy, sometimes it was more difficult for Clarence to make all of them coherent.

 

This was abundantly clear in our essay “The Real Detroit.” For this assignment, we had to write about a place. In our case, we chose our hometown, a city that has been through more trials and tribulations than almost any other city in the country. As we were writing it however, we realized that the story was all over the place.

 

The in the first draft of the essay, I thought it sounded good to start off with a story about how my dad checked me for accidentally leaving the door unlocked. In doing so, he said something along the lines of “you aren’t in Ann Arbor right now. This is Detroit”. To me it sounded like a great story to open with, so I rolled with it for the first draft. It ended up making things much more unclear.

 

This was mainly my fault. On that essay, I decided to let CJ get all of hit thoughts out on paper, and then I would restructure it from there. However, there was so much information that I couldn’t determine whether I was writing an essay about the history of Detroit, the identity of the city, the struggles of living there, or how people were breaking the stigmatism. What I did realize is that he had the right idea about keeping the opening personal. There was just a better way to describe the feeling that most native Detroiters feel.

 

“I am from Detroit.

 

No, I am not from Ferndale. I am not from Dearborn. I am not from Troy. I am from real, actual city of Detroit, Michigan.  

 

I feel as though there is a need to state that every time I tell someone where I am from when I am away from home. Something that is very typical of metropolitan areas is for people who do not actually live in the city to claim that they are from there, like the way that a parasite claims it’s host. Yes, these people may have a general knowledge of the area, and yes we may root for the same teams throughout the year, but there is a large difference between the place that you live and where I grew up.  I am a Detroiter, born and raised on the west side.  This is something that I carry with me as a badge of pride, when many outsiders feel as though this is something I should try to hide, like a mark on a perfect face. Well, I say that it’s those marks that make people unique.”

 

It was possibly the strongest opening to any story we had ever written. While it was clearly emotional and highly creative, it was also direct, getting to the main point of the essay almost immediately. It was at that point we both truly realized stories have to be more focused, and that is what was difficult. The only way that happens is if both CJ and I work together at the same time.

 

We had to start writing together. Instead of Clarence Stone and CJ Stone writing separately, Clarence J. Stone had to use both of us.

 

I think that realization is the culmination of my evolution as a writer. It explains why I found academic writing easy, and creative writing difficult. Find a good topic, using creative ideas, and streamlining is the key to good storytelling and good writing. I can’t say that I’m good at this yet, as this essay may actually prove, but I’m trying to get better. Eventually, I think I will get a good grasp on it, and when that finally happens, I think I will reach the next step of my writing. For now, I will keep working and hoping I can find a better balance. I would like to believe that the capstone project, which is the final piece I will write for my undergraduate career, will do a good job at reflecting this balance.