Portrait of a Writer

            Benjamin Franklin once said, “Either write something worth reading, or do something worth writing about”.  If I had to choose between these two options, I would definitely be doing something worth writing about. I never was a super creative writer, besides maybe in elementary school when my imagination soared, so I never really enjoyed writing entertaining stories or poems filled with emotion. I always was the guy writing dirty, funny poems that the teacher never liked, and when it came to revealing deep emotions, I struggled. Maybe I struggled more with coming up with the ideas and topics to write about than the actual writing. Either way, I know I didn’t enjoy it whether the piece turned out phenomenal or dreadful.  Research papers and informative papers over things I already knew about were always my favorite. I am the black and white type of thinker, and I excel at the writing that doesn’t involve a lot of creativity.

            My story telling ability was never that great. I took a class in high school called Creative Writing, and it went rougher than I had expected. I always spent way too long thinking of what to tell versus how to tell it. As long as I can remember, I was the last guy to have a topic to write about when it came to fictional stories, memoirs, or anything that involved an unspecific topic. If you tell me what to write specifically, I can probably write it. But as soon as you tell me to write about anything whatsoever, it’ll take me forever. Just throwing together ideas out of thin air comes slowly to me, and that is a major reason I don’t enjoy most forms of creative writing.

            As I said before, I am a black and white type of thinker. I don’t have that great of an imagination, and I know it. I’m a guy that likes to reveal knowledge in my writing, or draw conclusions and explain them to others through my writing. And this is the primal reason why I like to do research papers and things of that fashion. I love being able to just pull things out of my head or some other source on a certain topic and telling you about it. Writing about things I know about comes the easiest and I enjoy it the most. I don’t have to deal with writer’s block or coming up with a plot. I just have to know how to communicate the information to the reader effectively and accurately. If I don’t know a particular fact or method of explaining it, all I have to do is look it up or ask for someone else's opinion on the situation.  My black and white, straightforward, type of thinking really inclines me to prefer writing papers that doesn’t involve a whole lot of imagination and creativity.

            Imagination takes time. That’s another reason I don’t enjoy and flat out don’t want to write entertaining, inventive stories. I am a very task oriented type of person. I like to see things get done. When tasks don’t get accomplished or don’t get accomplished on time, I stress out to the max. Getting stuck behind writer’s block only slows me down in the process of finishing and perfecting my writing. I always am running and gunning, trying to accomplish all these tasks and still have a little “me time”.  And we all know there’s only 24 hours in a day, and our most valuable asset is time. When I get stuck thinking of ideas to write about, I feel like I am wasting time because my paper is not physically making any progress. I am not seeing words and thoughts being added to my paper, and with an informative or research paper, there is always more to write until you are able to capture the idea entirely in your writing. I prefer to sit down, focus on something entirely, and get it done. It takes me a long time to get in a “groove” with writing. If I keep getting in and out of my “groove”, it slows me down tremendously. If I can get something done in one bearable stretch of time, I will do it. With writing, that’s sometimes hard. Ideas come and go. One moment I’ll me scrambling trying to get my words on paper as fast as I can, then I’ll be sitting staring at the wall for twenty minutes stuck in a rut. These ruts infuriate me due to the fact I could be working and getting this paper done or working on something else I need to do.  Being a very task oriented person in general, I save a lot of time and stress writing without using my imagination.

            Sharing or showing emotion was never a big thing for me or many guys typically, so when a teacher tells you to write a poem as if you’re love just left you or you lost a loved one, that’s hard to do. Especially if you haven’t experienced it personally, or God forbid you have, but maybe you don’t want to talk or write about it. Maybe you just want to keep those emotions locked inside for you to keep. Sometimes you can’t always put all the feelings into words and would much rather reveal emotion through speech or action, if at all. Which leads to the reason writing with imagination and emotion is so damn hard. You have to show, not only tell the reader how you feel or what your characters are doing. You have to paint a picture in the reader’s head, and create pieces to a puzzle that your audience can put together and interpret for themselves. As the writer, you want that interpretation of your literature to be correctly understood, or else you may have wrote the wrong message or wasted your time entirely.

            As you can see from all of the thoughts above, creative and emotional pieces of writing are not my favorite, and probably never will. Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy writing, just not creatively. I may never write a touching piece that will baffle audiences and have people remember me for my work in literature. But like I started my paper with a quote, I will end my paper with a quote. “I may never write something worth reading, but I sure as hell can do something worth writing about.”- Blake Heimann