I fell in love with writing during my senior year of high school. Coach Grimes, the gruff softball-coach-turned-honors-English-teacher, had us write response papers every day in class. He'd put on a Beatles song and tell us to write. He didn't care what we wrote, as long as it filled the space. At first, I would fill up my obligatory two pages with gibberish.

But, eventually, my in-class ramblings gained structure. As I learned to free-write, I also realized that the parts of life that bugged me most could be sorted out. Putting my ideas on paper, arranging them logically, and rereading and revising them until they made sense gave me an outlet. At least half a decade before the glut of prepubescent soul-bearing that is Myspace, or the guilty collegiate, time-wasting pleasure called Facebook, I was typing out my anxieties on the old Fisher-Price styled iMacs at school.

I enjoy seeing how one word can change the entire feeling of a paragraph, how a paragraph break can give rhythm to the pacing of a page, how rearranging the structure of a sentence can add more impact to the message.