Growing With Your Writing

I noticed something about my writing recently. You see, I’ve decided (with my partner’s blessing) to focus wholly on my writing during my summer break from university. This means I’ve finished a long-overdue draft of one work-in-progress, begun another on Wattpad (https://my.w.tt/dB4UAs5IKW if you want to take a look), and re-dedicated myself to the amount of reading I’m doing. In both brushing up my first work and beginning this second one I’ve realized how much my writing has changed through my four years of university. I’m working on a creative writing minor, so I’ve taken every fiction course available to me in hopes that I would improve my writing skills and I do believe I’ve done that. But I have now realized how not me my writing has also become. Because these fiction courses all focussed on the art of the short story the emphasis was always being to the point, direct, giving only what information was absolutely necessary. I’m realizing now that that is simply not how I enjoy writing. Even my partner has admitted that this most recent work doesn’t feel like my writing and I’ve realized it’s because it’s lacking the personal depth and investment that I have with my other work. I’ve worked so hard on eliminating the passive voice, in varying sentence structure, in being concise that I’ve lost what I have always loved about reading: the total immersion into another world. I understand that I can’t go back to being overly-descriptive or having pointless scenes that don’t move my plot along, but nor can I remain concise and analytic. Somehow in the next few months I'm going to have to figure out how to work in that immersion into the new world I’m creating while not drowning myself and my readers in pointless exposition. I’ve come very far from where my writing was when I found the passion. My works used to be pretty trivial. When people say “write the book you want to read” I took it very seriously. I wrote what interested to me which, as a 14-year-old girl, I’m sure you can imagine how tedious it would have been for others to read. But I’ve grown in my writing and am working on both writing for joy for myself and also for others. It has been quite the journey for me, my partner can attest to how drastically this one work has been altered over the past 11 years. All I can hope for is that when I’ve finally published it, that my readers enjoy it as much as I do. My writing style has changed a lot in the past years and I think it’s still not done changing. I used to think that I had my own unique voice in my writing but now I wonder if I’ve lost it during my time in university. I hope now that I can find it again and still utilize the invaluable skills I’ve acquired.