Of the genus Sciurus, of the family Sciuridae

They’re chattering above me, high-pitched and frantic. Quick dashes from one limb of their tree to the next, bouncing in and out of a gap embedded in the scraggly oak, tiny eyes on me. I stop my intake of oxygen, eyes stuck to my reading, heart beating madly. Tails swish. A squabble over an acorn erupts. I peek upward at the entanglement of branches and spot the tuffs of auburn fur and teeth. There are squirrels above me. There are squirrels. Above me.

Squirrels, people have told me, are bundles of furry, fuzzy joy, content to gather and store, to sleep and eat and all that jazz. I’ll agree that they’re cute. I’ll even agree that they aren’t all that bad. However, you couldn't get me to admit that eight years ago. One summer evening at the park, I left my bike and jogged off to play. Less than an hour later, I toddled back, realizing that I might not get my bike back. Two squirrels, one on the handle bars the other on my seat, peered at me. Doing what any other dehydrated, irrational eight-year-old would do, I screamed. This eventually resulted in a pelting of acorns and various objects from the tiny monsters.

Over the years, I’ve pretty much gotten over my fear of this beady-eyed, rather malevolent rodent. No longer do I watch in fear from my bedroom window, eyeing a particularly pudgy squirrel perched on a branch. (With just inches of wall between me and them, I wasn’t exactly keen on watching their incisors strike again and again into inauspicious acorns.) I generally love animals, rodents and reptiles and all, and have housed more than one hamster, begged for ferrets, and ogled at rats much to my mother’s displeasure. Squirrels, however, are a different story. I still catapult from under oak trees thanks to them.

How I Write

The spark often starts with the words of others. There are writers I admire to the point of attempted emulation. Sometimes, their way with words draws me from my writing recluse into a new setting, situation, or style. I’m inspired. I’m excited. My pencil burns into the paper; my words perch haphazardly on little blue lines like fat birds on telephone wires. I love this feeling. I can almost feel my heartbeats blending with the page as I am fed into my work. Sometimes though, this feeling gets me into trouble.

My inner-critic will take this enthusiasm to a whole new level, channeling my admiration into a flood of uncertainty. There’s no way your writing will have the same affect, my inner-critic whispers, your words are clunky in this line, and you’re too wordy here, too sparse there. And I stop. I sit and stare at my page in horrid fascination. I want to write, just like wanting to breathe at the bottom of a lake, but I’m not drowning in water—I’m drowning in doubt.

Cliché as that last line sounds, it’s true. Sometimes little bubbles of inspiration make it through; sometimes I progress through the words, but not with them. I don’t feel the spark then. I can’t. Feeling them would give rise to my inner-critic’s usual snarl. So what if you can feel the words? No one else will. And maybe so, but more and more I find myself writing anyway. I know that I’m weak in areas (if wordiness was a sin, I’d have a one-way ticket to hell) but I also realize that I’ll get better. When I grab a pencil and prop a pad of paper in my lap, I’m at ease. Some music, a few books nearby, and little distraction can help so much. It took a long time to stand up to my inner-critic, and sometimes I still falter under her retorts, but I’m learning.

AP Comp has already inspired me. We’re not jumping through the hoops. We’re taking them and breaking them, tossing aside memorization for contemplation. My inner-critic is having a wonderfully pitiful time standing up against that. The keyboard under my fingers isn’t an instrument of grief anymore either, but a helper. My writing is neither the greatest nor the worst, but it’s me. It’s a learning process. That is how I write.