I think of myself as a writer. That only really started during my sophomore year of college though, when my English Literature professor suggested I take up a Writing Minor. Before then, I never thought I was good at it; I didn't feel like I had the imagination for it.
Back in primary and secondary school, I recall recreating my own versions of The Flash and The Killer Brussel Sprouts because I couldn't come up with my own story to tell. One of my classmates even called me on the former, but my teacher let it go, as I had written the tale in my own way. Now that I think about it, I'm usually better at improving something that already exists than creating something from scratch. And that doesn't go just for writing. I think that's one of the reasons I'm so good at quality assurance; though I don't look directly at the code, I have a head for finding the weak points in what others have done.
But I digress. Lately, I've been finding it more and more difficult to write. Part of it comes from working at a computer all day. Who really wants to come home and work on it all night, too? Part of it is also the amount of work I usually put into a single post. Gone are the days that I could write and write and write, hit submit, and be over with it. Now, I write, go back and rewrite a bit, write some more, add a sentence to the paragraph I started with, and so on. I almost wonder if all the writing classes I took at school have ruined me. I'm only interested in the superb ideas. I want perfect punctuation, grammar, and spelling (he says as he gives "supurb" a second look and corrects it). And all these things cause this once easy hobby to become long and arduous.
I took the fun out of it. I want everything to be exceptional. It's not just about writing to get stuff out anymore; it's about the writing being perfect. I yearn for my writing to be exceptional, yet that makes it harder to write anything at all. Vicious circle, ya know? I don't mind writing personal stuff about myself. I'm pretty open about all that. Now, I need to get over the myth that everything one creates is fantastic (if anything is...).
We'll see if I can get past all this. In the end, it's the subject I'm writing about that really matters. I have a lot of things floating around my head that I want to write. If I don't get them out, no one benefits from it and I don't even get the opportunity to try to create something new and cool. And that's half the fun, anyway.
