Artifact One, an excerpt from a story I wrote for National Novel Writing Month during my freshman year,

shows what my writing looked like at the very beginning of my writing journey. National Novel Writing Month
is a challenge that tasks the individual with writing a novel in a month. In order to complete this challenge, the
individual must write roughly 1,600 words a day. This is a very strenuous task that requires a lot of dedication to
the passion of writing. The goal is not to produce high quality work, but as much work as you can in such a
short period of time.

Artifact Two, a piece from my creative writing class senior year, is a descriptive writing piece. The writing style
of this is a bit different, as the focus here was quality over quantity. The piece is short, but arguably has a lot
more impact. It is similar in the sense that both pieces are creative writing and driven from passion instead of
academics. This piece was a very short story, but it still has a lot of impact.

Throughout my years of writing, I have always had the mindset that I want to grow and become better. This
meant reading other books to inspire my writing. This meant spending almost any free time I had at my laptop
clacking away on the keys. These two artifacts show serious growth. The writing done freshman year, while not
bad, is definitely not nearly as well-written as my piece from senior year. Having this growth mindset allowed
me to grow. I will continue to keep the mindset, and in ten years I might look at this piece I wrote senior year
and think it's not very good. This mindset has really helped push me in my writing journey and it has helped me
produce work I’m proud of.