Writing Inventory

By writing this letter I’m expressing my interest in your writing class next semester.  I would greatly enjoy the opportunity of taking a course that focuses on honing my writing skills, as unfortunately i have always found writing to be one of my weaker skills.  Even though writing is not one of my strong suits, I do enjoy writing in my spare time, mostly fiction, but my family does keep a “Camp Log” that I update regularly.  I also spend a lot of my spare time playing video games, driving my fourwheeler or snowmobile and just hanging out with my friends.

Some of my favorite authors are Rick Riordan, J.K. Rowling, Christopher Paolini and Stephen King.  As you can probably tell from my list of favorite authors, my favorite kind of writing is fiction. I love these authors because they do such an amazing job of pulling you into their worlds and developing characters that you start to feel like you know.

I find that narrative writing comes easiest to me because of my love for fiction and the fact that I love developing characters in a story.  I also enjoy talking to others through text and chat rooms, I especially like talking to people from other parts of the world and hearing their stories and views on various subjects.  I believe that essay writing is the most difficult kind of writing for me as I do not enjoy writing non-fictional stories.

I love reading ghost stories and anything scary online and off, which is where I get most of my ideas when writing horror stories.  I am currently working on a short horror story that I intend to post online.  It is in it’s beginning stages, but I can tell you that it is about a young man and woman who, while watching a movie home alone, hear a knocking on their door.  The boy cautiously checks to see who is there through a window as they had been watching a scary movie moments before but is relieved to see that it is just the girl’s mother.  When he tells this to his girlfriend, she says with a look of terror that her mother is on a business trip to Alberta.  One thing leads to another and the young couple learn that something is stealing the identities of people in their community and they have no one to trust but themselves.

I do not have any pieces of writing that I am particularly proud of, as I have never really tried my hand at writing on my own until recently, so none of my works have really taken off. There is one story that I wrote for English that I thought I did a good job on.  It was about my trip to Renous Lake, with a few friends and family over March break, where we spent the whole week snowmobiling, playing cards and building enormous snowmen.

I usually do at least two draft copies along with a brainstorming page.  My first draft is usually quite messy with arrows connecting sentences and whole paragraphs scratched out.  My second draft is the cleaner one with everything in the right order and neatly written.  Sometimes due to time restraints I will work at making my second draft up to my good copy standards and pass it in but I prefer having the chance to write a separate good copy.

I feel that some of my strengths as a writer are my storytelling abilities.  I have been told that the plots in my stories are next to none and quite interesting.  I have also been told that I am very descriptive in my writing.  I feel that some of my weaknesses as a writer are my less than perfect sentence structure and my inability to write essays as well as I want to be able to.

By far my favorite subject to write about is fictional horror stories, there is just something about the unknown and the feared that greatly interests me.  I like zombie stories as much as the next guy but writing about the things that go bump in the night and the things you see out of the corner of your eye is what I really enjoy writing about.  My second favorite subject would have to be personal experiences as I love telling others about the things I’ve seen and done.

My goals as a writer are to be able to write essays and short stories to the best of my abilities and be able to entertain those who read my works.  Well I hope you will allow me to take part in your writing course next semester as it would really help me hone my writing skills.