"The
Whys and Whats", why I like to write and what my writing process is for
the fiction story. The question of why I like to write seems like a question
that I could answer until the end of me. I like to write, because I believe
that writing is a tool that we are given to heal ourselves. Writing to me has
always meant freedom. From grade school until our college years we are taught
the “proper” way to write and the “grammatically correct” ways to write. I’m
not exactly sure of when I first discovered that this was not the only way to
write, but it had to be in like elementary school. I began to read outside of
the “The Babysitter’s Club” genre and I thought, people can write like this?
Use language differently and just completely BE FREE. It gave me a box to break
out of with what I read and the potential I knew I had to also create. Writing
gives me comfort and I can write myself out of funks. Writing gives me the permission
to be inexcusably myself. Sometimes this is a little scary, the vulnerable
part, but other times it’s just freeing. On to the next, what the process is
that I’m using for my fiction story. I’m using this method that I like to call
the “jump in and swim…or drown”. I was really intimidated just to start the
piece, not really knowing what to expect from myself with a fiction. I figured
if I just sat in front of it and pushed it out of myself that something would come
from it. This method works for me so far, but I need to find another one that
helps me to pace my process a little more. Sometimes I’ll go through dry spells
where I’m not productive at all before I produce a chunk of something. Another
method that I use which I can see that I need to use moderately. I click on the
sentence of a character or landscape when I 1st introduce them and I
try to spread the details of a character out like…an accordion. I’m always
trying to explain something the way that someone, besides me, seeing it would
try to explain it. This causes me to over describe, but it also results in me describing
things really well. Now I’m going through process of making a list of what I want
to happen from this point on, looking at where I left off, and following the
necessary steps to get to those points on my list. I’m enjoying figuring out
what methods work best for me, it’s helping me to hone my skills as a writer.
