Portrait of Me as a Writer

Writing, to me is kind of a burden. I don’t want to do it, I avoid it until the last minute, and then I rush to get it done. If I can just go on about whatever, then sure, I could write for a very long time before I would get bored and try to start doing something else. I really like the thought pieces because I can just write whatever. Unfortunately, most papers have to be about a specific thing. Even in the thought pieces, thought, I had to keep my ideas to ideas about a single thing, even if it was kind of a broad thing. Instead of focusing on myself and how I could relate to the piece, I focused on what other real-world things the piece was kind of like. I don’t know if that was wrong or right, but that is how it ended up working.

Once I get an idea in my head, I write about it until I can’t think of anything else to add to that idea. Then, I go back and reorder everything until I get it to kind of flow, and it isn’t like all over the place, sometimes even saying the same thing twice, which is redundant.

I am kind of OCD about errors, but I am starting to learn to put that off until I have all of my ideas down. I just did my second thought piece, and I successfully did not correct a “didn’ tknow” until I had finished all of my ideas. And now that I put this in here, writing the rest of this paper is going to bug me because I can see the red squiggly lines. And yes, I know that I can turn them off, and I even know how, but then when I need to see those red squiggly lines, I won’t be able to see them later, and it sucks switching back and forth between the two settings all the time. Sorry for going off on a rant. Speaking of which:

I used to keep writing things, then erase them. Then, when I wanted to think of that thing again, and I couldn’t and couldn’t look it back up again, which sucked. I need to stop erasing things until I have all of my ideas down.

Another thing I don’t like about writing is editing. I hate trying to get all of the things in the right order. It makes sense to me, since I know what I was talking about, but I know that it won’t make sense to anybody else, so I feel like I have to redo the entire thing so it makes sense to other people (which I will NOT do on this. On this, I feel that one draft is enough, and I can just reorder some of the points I have made. Effectively, my brainstorming will become my submission with a little bit of organization).

To me, writing anything is challenging, especially when I have a limit to reach. For instance, this is an over three page thing, and I have done a lot of reflecting so far, and have not even gotten a page and a half yet. I think I would enjoy writing a book, because there is nobody telling me how long it has to be, what it has to be about, or anything like that. I can just write and write, and with no worries about who is going to read it, how well they like it, or anything like that.

I don’t really prepare for writing anything at all ever. On the thought pieces, I read through the article, then I wrote down my thoughts right away and blogged it. Not a whole lot of editing, not a whole lot of preparation, just opening a word file, formatting it correctly, and writing away. When I am done, I look back through it, see if it makes sense, and if it doesn’t I change a little bit, do some reordering until it does make sense, and then I post it. No regrets. If I fail, then I fail. If I don’t then I don’t. Hopefully I don’t. Because that would suck.

I hate structure. Freewriting is so much more fun. In high school, essays were an introduction, 3 supporting facts with evidence, and a conclusion. I hated that so much. What if your essay made more sense with a lot of little facts instead of 3 major facts, kind of like us talking in class about all of us overpowering a potential shooter if s/he ever showed up in our classroom? I have always been trying to bend the rules a little bit and organize things a little bit differently than what was required. Now that I don’t have to follow that format much more, I am so much happier. I hope I never have to be confined to five paragraphs to prove something ever again.

I think all of the essays and book reports that I have done in the past have ruined writing for me. All of the steps that I had to take were predefined for me. Now I view it as something I have to do, and less like something I get to do. Now that I have thought about it a little bit, I get to go off on rants if I want to. I get to talk about whatever I want if I want. I get to decide what the main character does. Not the teacher.

I like thinking in the mindsets of the characters that already exist and have their personalities already defined for them, like a roleplaying game. If I know how a certain character should react, I can usually twist it just enough that it is unexpected, yet expected at the same time, if that makes sense. Kind of like when you know that that dwarf is going to open the door down the hall, but he kicks it down instead, sending it flying. It is that moment, when you know something is going to come out of the dark, and it does, it just wasn’t what you were expecting to come out. Or a girl walks in on her boyfriend cheating on her, and they form a threesome instead of breaking up. Things like that. I think I would enjoy writing those kinds of things. (Not that I’m some sick pervert).

I also think, after writing all of this, that I would be more comfortable writing if I wasn’t graded on it. It makes me think that my writing is less of a reflection on me (even though it still is). In a good book, you aren’t really thinking “what was the author thinking when he wrote this,” but you are thinking “what was the character thinking?” I feel that if I am graded on something, it shifts the attention toward me and away from the writing. It becomes “What were you thinking when writing this” and less of “what was the character thinking.” I hope this makes sense. That being said, I believe that the audience for this paper would have to be my old Rhetorical Techniques instructor from High school. I don’t believe she is a bad person, in fact, at one point I asked her to be a reference for me. I just think that the grading that she used was extremely harsh. In retrospect, any of the college papers I have written so far were not nearly as hard as the ones she has made me write, although that could be that I am still a freshman, and haven’t had to write many papers. However, I still think that Rhetorical Techniques was still way too hard of a class for high school, and it may have put a damper on my willingness to write in the future.