Robyn's Personal Statement: FINAL!!!!

Edgar Allan Poe once said that writers 'prefer having it understood that they compose by a

species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition'. I am one such individual. Inspiration hits and

your fingers itch for the sensation of putting pen to paper. You do not think of themes or

subtext but scribble the outpour and turn inspiration to words, emotions to themes, instinct

to metre. You breathe in the ideas and breathe out the design as your entire being becomes the

words you write.

I was taught to write by the books I read. As a child I wandered through The Secret Garden and

giggled at Mitton's Plum. As a teenager I grew with the Little Women and was stunned by

Zephaniah's Too Black, Too Strong. Today, I would require an extra 4000 characters to list the

novels that have passed through my hands; everything from The Golden Notebook to The Waves.

There are three areas which I feel a particular passion for, the first being 19th century

literature with the likes of Eugene Onegin and Portrait of a Lady. Second are novels which

push society's boundaries, such as Jude the Obscure and Invisible Man. I also have a great

love of international literature including Old Goriot and War & Peace but feel that translated

novels lose the authors syntactical crafting. It was this that sparked my interest in studying

French and I now seek to become fluent.

Studying French provided me with the skill of extracting information from research and using

it to write my own work while law developed fundamental analytical and essay writing skills.

Politics allowed me to practise rhetoric and enhanced my ability of debate and unbiased

comparison. I chose to study the combination of English Literature & Language because of the

creative writing element of the course which specifically taught me how to write and allowed

me to improve my writing. Having now had this experience, I have no intention of letting it go

and have immersed myself in the world of creative writing.

I subscribe to The Writer's Magazine, using the articles as lessons and the competitions as

practice. I was a teaching assistant in a year 9 and 10 English class and am in charge of the

school's Creative Writing Club which began this year. Combined with my other community work,

this culminated in a Jack Petchey award for my contribution to creative writing within my

school. I received GBP 200 to spend on any area of my school and chose to split it between the

school production which I wrote and look to produce this summer and a new school magazine for

which I am editor.

Outside of school, I was chosen by the Windsor Fellowship and Hummer-Tuttle Foundation to be

part of a Dialogue and Leadership Programme which provided a group of young people from London with the opportunity to engage in dialogue with their Iraqi and American peers to explore issues of faith and leadership and strategies for reducing conflict. The programme consisted of a series of training workshops and a 2 week trip to the US, ending with a presentation in October to the stakeholders of our group including the chairmen and trustees of the Windsor Fellowship and the founders of the Hummer-Tuttle Foundation. Despite the programmes end, our group continue to work together to resolve issues within our communities.

In June I attended an English Literature degree event consisting of several lectures at a

university. While mesmerised by the detailed manner of analysing author's work, I still found

myself itching for the opportunity to practise what I was being taught. The course of English

and Creative Writing, on the other hand, scratches this itch to an extent I could never have

imagined. The days have passed since writing was simply a euphoric hobby for me; it is now a

future I am tirelessly working towards. Over the past 10 years I have been taking small steps

for man but I know that reading this course with your university will be my giant leap for

mankind.