Sarah Radcliff
ENG 1010
Professor Bennion
14 February 2016
Bread Crumbs
Reading and writing may seem to go hand in hand in a literary sense, however, becoming a reader and becoming a writer were two very separate instances in my life. I became a reader long before I developed as a writer. I became a reader much differently than I became a writer. Both seemed to bud very naturally for me, but at different stages of my life. I have always loved to read, but I have not always loved to write. To read is to absorb. To write is to create.
I honestly can’t think of a time in my life when I couldn’t read something. I was a very early reader, and I think I challenged myself to always be able to read better. My first memories of reading are with my dad and my brother, Andy.
We grew up with little money. I shared a bedroom with my brother for the first half of my childhood. Every night before bed, my dad would come read to my brother and me. We read out of an old “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” book. The book was huge. I can remember the weight of that book, as I pulled it off of our book shelf and carried it to my dad every night. I had to wrap my arms completely around it to bring it across the room.
The book was red with a gold border on the cover. The words “Grimm’s Fairy Tales” were pressed into the cover in metallic print. The cover was cloth and smelled like dust. The book was old and stained. The pages were yellow, and had drips of coffee on almost all of them. The drips of coffee were evidence that my grandma had read to my dad from this exact book. It didn’t matter the time of day or night, that woman always had a cup of coffee in her hand.
Our favorite fairy tale in the big, red storybook, was “Hansel and Gretel”. This is the story I remember my dad reading to us the most. When I think of this story, I think of my dad’s morbid sense of humor. Of course, my dad decides to pick the story of the witch that eats children to read to his kids every night.
When we were younger, probably four and six, my dad used to tell my brother and me that we were not he and my mom’s first set of kids.
“The winter before Andy was born was a tough one.” I remember he would say, shaking his head.
“Your mom lost her job. I was a fry cook. We just didn’t have any money. We had two kids before you guys, you know? Boy, they were a pain. They didn’t behave for anything. We decided, instead of starving through a miserable winter with the kids, we’d just eat them, and try having another set of kids later. Maybe these kids would be better behaved, you know?”
I never believe this story to be true, but my dad would bring it up any time Andy and I would fight, or act up. He would raise his eyebrows and shrug his shoulders while telling us that money was looking pretty tight, and this winter was supposed to be a rough one.
I can still remember the ornery face my dad used to make when he would off -handedly threaten to eat us. I can’t believe at such a young age, I understood his macabre humor, and found it equally as funny as he did.
My brother and I knew my parents never ate their children, and got a serious kick out of that story whenever he would bring it up to threaten us into behaving. Looking back now, I can see why “Hansel and Gretel” was my dad’s favorite to read to us. That story matched up with his ridiculous sense of humor.
As my dead read through the pages of “Hansel and Gretel”, he would have my brother and I act out parts of the story. He would change the names in the story to “Andy and Sarah”, and by the end of the story, I’d be throwing a witch in the oven and busting my brother out of a cage to escape the candy cabin in the woods.
Every night, we turned reading into a live action comedy. By the end of the story, my brother and I would be rolling on the ground laughing as we outsmarted the witch and found our trail of breadcrumbs back to reality. This was the foundation of my enthusiasm for reading. This escape into an unreality every night before bed was exciting.
My dad turning reading into this game helped me to understand my role as a reader. In a narrative, I become the main character. I live the journey. My dad taught me to jump into the character and use my imagination to create the world around me. The writer provides the story and the structure, and I provide a little imagination, and together, I’m a thousand miles away in a made up universe. It was effortless entertainment.
Writing, however, is not effortless. Writing seems like it wouldn’t be that complex. I have an idea. I put that idea into words. Therefore, I am a writer. I used to think it was that easy until my senior year of high school.
My senior year of high school I had a brilliant writing teacher. Her main area of focus was descriptive writing. I remember the day she taught me the importance of descriptive writing.
Her desk was a table in the corner with a mess of papers and a computer on top. As our class filtered in and took their seats, she would sit at her mess and chit chat with each arriving student.
She was a very strict woman. The first day of her class as she listed all of her rules. She was a woman of terrible allergies, so scents of any kind were forbidden in her classroom. If you had her class that day, and you wore perfume, she would make you listen to her lecture in a chair right outside of her door. She took her allergies and her rules very seriously.
Though she was strict, she was a very personal woman. She always greeted every student by name. She always commented on something personal to each student. She was witty and charming, yet physically plain. Her long, grey hair was always twisted up into a tight bun. She wore no makeup, most likely because of her allergies, and very plain clothing. Her pockets were full of tissues, and her nose was always a contrasting reddish color to her very pale skin tone.
After she had addressed each student, and everyone was in their seat, she got up from her mess of scattered papers and walked to the front of the class. She had a piece of paper in her hand, from which she began to read aloud:
“Yesterday, I went to the grocery store. I needed ingredients to make dinner. It was my husband’s birthday. He wanted me to make a cake. So, I went to the store and got the ingredients. I made him a cake. We had dinner. We watched a movie. Then we went to bed.”
She then proceeded to ask the class if what she just read was an interesting story. The classroom agreed that the story, indeed, was drab. She asked us why? Why did we not find her story interesting, and what could she do to make it more interesting to read?
My recollection of this memory may not be the most vivid, because of how long ago it was, but I remember her then reading an excerpt from a paper she had written in college. The paper was about when her parents got a divorce. She was young, maybe seven or eight, and what stands out with me the most is the part where her father was asking her who she wanted to live with.
In this part of the story, my teacher described herself as suddenly having a deep fascination with the carpet. She was sitting on the floor, tears were running down her face, and she began to pick at the brown, shag carpet. She wrote about the color of the carpet being slightly iridescent in the lighting. She wrote about how the color changed as she brushed her hand to the left, and she could erase the mark she just made by sweeping her hand to the right.
This piece was definitely not about carpet. However, the deep description of the carpet told the reader that she felt so uncomfortable in the situation of telling her father she didn’t want to choose who she had to live with that she focused all of her attention on the carpet. The carpet was there to distract her from the decision she had to make.
This was the first time I understood that how a writer describes a situation is where the emotion is drawn from the reader. How the writer describes a situation helps to paint the picture of the emotion being portrayed at that time. I had never realized the importance of descriptive writing until my teacher read that excerpt aloud.
That one piece of her college paper changed the way I write. It didn’t just teach me that there was a proper way to write, it made me want to write in a way that captivated my reader. I stopped being afraid to drift off into things that weren’t necessarily main parts of a story. I realized that backstory and writing about the actual emotional feeling that a character feels in that situation is important.
This lesson taught me that to depict emotion, you don’t have to explain what emotion the reader is supposed to be feeling. Describing the character’s actions and physical feelings is the writer leaving a trail a breadcrumbs to lead the reader into understanding what the character is feeling emotionally.
Each of these instances, though separate, still influence my reading and writing. Every time I sit down to read, I become the character. I act out the story in my imagination with myself as the main character. When I write, I look to write deeper descriptions that clarify the emotion that I want to be received by the reader.
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