When LaMarian Watkins was a young boy in elementary school, his mother, an aspiring school teacher, would sit him down and tell him to read and write for two hours every day. His mother wanted to make sure he had a strong reading and comprehending level at a young age. She knew it was imperative to have knowledge built on a strong foundation. This continued until Mr. Watkins attended Hickory Ridge Middle School in Memphis, TN where he started to write on his own for pleasure. During middle school, his emotions were at their highest, so he needed an escape. He used to create stories from sport movies and sport books that he watched as a teenager. LaMarian used the characters to form a descriptive story to pull his audience in. For LaMarian, when he wrote or read, he felt as if he was watching a movie in his head. Mr. Watkins started writing because he wanted to include the reader in his mental journey. While he was in middle school, he started to get involved in sports, date, and write poetry in his free time. LaMarian had a girlfriend he had been dating that he wanted to express his feelings to her, but he didn’t know how. His father recommended that he write poetry for his girlfriend to tell her how he felt about her. LaMarian set about writing a thoughtful and personal poem for his middle school girlfriend. Mr. Watkins handed his girlfriend the poem and she let everyone read it. He was very embarrassed, his football friends called him sensitive. When I asked Mr. Watkins how he felt, he explains “It was something personal, only [meant] for her. My dad told me that I should write a girl I love poetry or something. I was only in the 7th grade. At that time, my emotions were real for her. I felt like my friends and she were ragging on me” (Watkins). LaMarian felt betrayed and quit writing openly after that moment forward. At a young age LaMarian began to write continuations of the movies and books that he didn’t want to end. He felt as if he was in control of the characters and the situations they came across. When he was writing, he felt accomplished after making a very descriptive and detailed section of the story. Even when LaMarian wasn’t writing, he was constantly toiling about his characters in his mind and what they were going to do next. For LaMarian, it was a way to express his emotions and describe the stories he saw in his head to others. Mr. Watkins didn’t think it was appropriate to be an emotional writer as a football player, so he expressed his freedom and exercised his imagination at home while writing poems about his life as a black American living in the inner city. He would live vicariously through the characters he read and watched on television. Mr. Watkins didn’t expresses his feelings openly after writing a poem for his girlfriend because, “it was personal and she let everybody read it. It was very embarrassing” (Watkins). For LaMarian, writing was like a tree house of literature that nobody knew about. Safe from the judgment of others and where his imagination had no boundaries. When setting plan to
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LaMarian had the foundation from a prior source, he would flush out his characters, add personal experiences and emotions into the story, and would write about situations that the original source hadn’t put them through before. LaMarian’s favorite book was Tuesdays with Morrie because “it was so descriptive, it felt as if I was there. I started to care for the characters” (Watkins). Mr. Watkins wrote as soon as he got home, but it didn’t stop there. He would run through the past scenes to make sure it was drawing a vivid picture for his audience, and he would create the future scenes that he wrote about when he got home. For LaMarian, writing was like a portal into his mind for which the audience could see vision. He wanted to make sure that the audience empathized with the characters in a believable and realistic situations. Later in middle school, his emotions were at their all-time high. To express his emotions, he often wrote about his life and feelings through
LaMarian had the foundation from a prior source, he would flush out his characters, add personal experiences and emotions into the story, and would write about situations that the original source hadn’t put them through before. LaMarian’s favorite book was Tuesdays with Morrie because “it was so descriptive, it felt as if I was there. I started to care for the characters” (Watkins). Mr. Watkins wrote as soon as he got home, but it didn’t stop there. He would run through the past scenes to make sure it was drawing a vivid picture for his audience, and he would create the future scenes that he wrote about when he got home. For LaMarian, writing was like a portal into his mind for which the audience could see vision. He wanted to make sure that the audience empathized with the characters in a believable and realistic situations. Later in middle school, his emotions were at their all-time high. To express his emotions, he often wrote about his life and feelings through