Writing

I Became a Writer Because I Failed English Class

From class clown to writer

Matthew Donnellon
4 min readApr 20, 2024

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Photo by MD Duran on Unsplash

I was not a good student.

Like at all.

Not in highschool.

Especially not in middle school.

I feel an everlasting shame for what I put my mother through in those years.

All my teachers said the same thing, “smart kid. Refuses to do any work.”

I rarely did homework and the stuff I did do was done poorly in the ten minutes before class starts.

Ironically enough, my worst class was English. It’s in that class that this story would find its genesis.

I hated English in school, middle school especially/. I thought the books we read were boring — except The Giver god how I love that book — and was terrible at grammar. I am still terrible at grammar. If you read my work at all you surely know this.

I was also a bad writer.

Correction: I was a bad typist. I was in school just as computer printed paper was expected even for kids and I couldn’t keep up.

I was so slow I would write my papers long hand and have my mom typos them up for me after she got home from work.

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Matthew Donnellon

Matthew Donnellon is a writer, artist, and sit down comedian. He is the author of The Curious Case of Emma Lee and Other Stories.