Painting Words

“The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald

“My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.”
John D. MacDonald

“What a writer wants to do is not what he does.”
Jorge Luis Borges

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”
Oscar Wilde

“If the doctor told me I had six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster.”
Isaac Asimov

            Writing sucks.  Writing is really fun.  Writing is to spill out one’s soul.  But writing still sucks.  In these four sentences, one extremely important, key elements of writing is missing.  What is it?  The most critical part of writing is what you write.  From analytical essays to research papers to short stories to satires to “fan-fictions” of TV-shows or cartoons, writers either write infatuatedly or “get-it-done-fast”edly. 

            Consequently, I also hate and love writing.  When reading adventure books or sci-fi novels that create whole universes of unique and endlessly interesting characters and cultures and events, readers care not about, say, the image of Bean being Ender’s “shadow”.  Thus, when our highschool teachers ask us to write about the significance of wearing jeans or dark-green sunglasses and a large hat, we begin to loathe the painful work bestowed upon us, instead of enjoy the great worlds that the authors gave blood to create.  Analytical writing, or critical writing in general is what turned writing sour for many youth in high school, middle school, and even elementary school.  The reason why it turns writing so face-twistingly sour is because it tends to lack interest.  Since we students do not care about beating images so hard with hoses and finding every possible nook and cranny to connect it with, we tend not to write to our fullest possible potential, get a flaming grade from our teachers, and in return begin to hate, with a flame, analytical and/or critical writing.  And, for most, it is this process that then spills its sourness over the rest of the world of different kinds of writing, corrupting the image of everything else.  After such traumatic experiences with plain “writing,” not many people have the stomach to go and write in other styles on their own, thinking that the two are the same. 

            Like most, I also hated writing.  That is, until I blindly stumbled upon a website, filled with what are called “fanfics,” or fiction written by fans based on or in the worlds of various TV-shows, books, animes, etc.  This is when I began to hate critical writing.  The Great Schism of writing.  Reading these stories (some better than others, since fan-fiction writing is just a past-time hobby) led me to discover what other kinds of writing that just weren’t all that bad.  Joining this online community, I began to read, as well as write my own stories, getting feedback from more experienced members and in return critiquing their progressing work.  By finding such a community of fiction and story writers, I was finally able to differentiate between the different types of writing, and decide which ones I liked to do, and which ones to avoid.  The introduction of Personal Essays last year is yet another style of writing that I like, since you throw out your own opinions and experiences (such as when I tried driving on my own at the age of 6), in your own voice.  Casual and entertaining writing in general is where I have found my niche.

            Though I have focused on writing thus far, reading is just as important.  Newspapers shovel lots of bullshit that you still need to know, classics such as The Awakening work really well for insomniacs, romance novels seem to be recycled, rehashed material, but are still fun, and sci-fi and other fiction novels are great for entertainment.  Not being able to read is much like not being able to hear.  Opinions, news, and stories that are passed around the world in writing are to be missed if one cannot read.  Newspapers and magazines, although full of crap, are useful in that they show, say, the latest news of the battles in Iraq and many different opinions that go along with them.  Without newspapers and magazines, we would not be able to see the many different sides of such situations, and our own opinions would thus remain uneducated and thus unfair. 

Classic novels, on the other hand, bore us half to death but are still just as important.  The reason is because they portray the societies and the cultures of where and when they take place, and add a living, real example to the gray, motionless examples shown in history books.  Stitching her scarlet letter, Hester moved out of the Puritan New England, shown to us as such a constricting, tight society that we ourselves could not have imagined simply from reading about them in a textbook.  Such novels further educate readers of the feelings and emotions of historical times. 

Finally, we come to fiction.  Fiction is what unlocks any and all restraints set by any other type of writing.  Prose and poetry may set one’s mind free, but are still limited by diction and syllables and whatnot.  Fiction writing is the freestyle type of writing that lets authors create the Mountains of Mordor and X-wings and the Normandy Beach Invasions, in any way they want, for the reader to experience.  To read a fiction novel is many things.  The first obvious result of reading fiction is entertainment.  It’s just damn fun.  But it’s more; to read fiction is not to read what the author had himself imagined, but to take the author’s words and to unlock and expand your own worlds of imagination.  The mental image one gets of Diagon Alley when one first reads Harry Potter differs with everyone else’s.  The expansion and use of your imagination makes you discover who you are, and just what you’re capable of doing and thinking of.