In the article “Why I Write” Joan Didion discusses her career as a writer and the motivation behind her work. She states that one of her primary reasons for writing is to comprehend her own thoughts; and that if she had had the ability to make sense of her own mind there would have been no reason for her to become a writer. She talks about how by writing about certain thoughts and pictures that “shimmer”, or stand out, to her, she is able to delve deeper into why these images seem significant to her and from there understand the story the pictures are trying to tell her.
I basically only write out of necessity. It’s rare that I write something that’s not required for college, like an essay or email. This isn’t how it always was, though; in high school I took creative writing and was a part of the staff for the school literary arts magazine, so I wrote short stories and poems all the time. I wrote these because I found writing calming and enjoyed creating something that I could be proud of and share with others. Once I left high school, however, I lost a lot of my motivation to write. One reason is that I haven’t had as much time to read things other than textbooks, and I used to get most of my inspiration to write through reading. Another reason is that without a class like creative writing or the school magazine forcing me to write for a deadline it’s hard to push myself to make progress on stories or poems; I’m a perfectionist, so nothing I add ever seems good enough and ends up getting deleted. I would like to get back into writing creatively again, since I feel a bit guilty when I read great stories or poems by other people and know I haven’t really made any progress as a writer since I haven’t been practicing. It’s hard not to procrastinate, though.
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Charlottebuckle up homestuck cause this is my blog Archives
May 2017
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