Why Do You Write? (A Personal Account)

   Sorry for my late blog, everybody, but I decided that this week was a good week to procrastinate... I mean, I was too busy. Yeah, that's it. This week's blog I figured I would open up to you a little bit.       Understand who I am as a person and help myself get past my low mood level that is keeping me from writing. So I thought I'd take a trip down memory lane and remind myself WHY I started writing to begin with and, with your permission, I'd like to take you with me down this lane.

    So sit back, relax, and enjoy a story of a story teller. Maybe if (or when) you're down and can't write, you'll recap to your own reasons to why you write.

   "I was 13 years old and the summer sun started to fade away, leaving behind it's unforgivable southern heat in the month of August. I had just returned from visiting my favorite relatives in New Hampshire and returned to my life as a good son to a single, alcoholic father and straight A student in my Middle School where I was a minority in a violent school.

   Up until that point, I only wrote every now and then. My 7^th grade English Honors teacher from the previous year had made a thing called 'Free Write Friday' where everyone would spend 10 minutes just writing. Anything. Everything. I suppose that was the first time I really put pen to paper and made something come out. Every Friday I would expand on what I wrote the previous week and turn that in. My writing wasn't the best but I received praise for my use of dialogue (when in reality, I didn't really know what I was doing. I was just assuming it was right) and encouraged to continue to write, which I didn't until the following year.

   Anyways, as August dragged on I began to find out that thing's were different from before I went away for the week. My Dad was always the short tempered type but I found that it was getting worse. Not in the sense of him, but in the sense that I took more of a stance against his temper which, in turn, made arguments and a very hostile trailer to live in. At the time, I began to feel like no one really cared about what was going on so I didn't really talk much about it, but I needed an outlet so I started to write again. I didn't focus on short stories until I was in Junior year of High School, but I did write poems. Countless poems. Unrequited love and 'sorrowful' poems that helped me vent the complex emotions that I couldn't really verbally express.

 

  I started writing my short stories when I realized that poems were not really doing it for me, anymore. I wanted to expand and become better as a writer. I didn't really care before then, I just wrote for the expression and not for the images or metaphor or how it read, as long as it was out there. But now I wanted to grow as a writer so that readers would read my stories or poems and enjoy it instead of suffering and dragging their way through my writings. So I started to write and I started to revise and edit. I wanted to tell my story but in a way that made it readable. It would help me express all my emotions and pain while becoming a decent enough writer to the point where I might be able to publish and get my story out there in the world.

   I still work and strive to become a better writer and I have a very long road to go before I feel my writings are considered great."

   So that's my writing story. It's why I started writing and why I continue to write. So what's your story? Why did you start writing? What keeps driving you to write that next sentence or paragraph? Let me know! Or simply write it down for yourself so that you can keep yourself motivated and know why you keep doing what you do!

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Check out my blog out every Tuesday for a new blog on writing tips, advice, stories, and so on!!!