Week 1: Me and Writing

I'm one of two different people when I'm writing, depending on whether I'm being asked to produce an essay or forcing myself to write a poem (or short story, or whatever).


Both of them prefer silence. Both are easily distracted by noises and especially if words are being spoken. I can listen to wordless music when I'm writing to help me focus and that's it. When I'm trying to produce words and I'm being assaulted by other words, it just doesn't work.


The essay-writer writes at night, partially because he's a procrastinator. I'm not sure if it's whether I've adapted to writing at 3 AM or because of some neurological correlation to fatigue or some living Romantic notion about the silently-flowing passions of the nighttime, but when it's dark out and I have some coffee, I produce really well-written formal material. But I am capable of formally writing when I have to in any quiet environment.


The creative writer writes whenever he pleases. It really is true that artists (or people who want to be artists, I'm either) get struck by inspiration at random moments. Sometimes my chest will fill up with deep emotion and I'll lie on my bed with my laptop tapping out a poem. The reason I don't write as many stories is because the deep emotion only stays for short amounts of time; I did manage to write one short story once that I'm rather proud of because, out of luck, my chest just got flooded with deep emotion for about a month.


The essay-writer writes in driven streams composed of bursts of writing followed by short breaks involving caffeinated pacing back and forth across the writing area while he thinks up the next sentence or so and tries to graph forward the essay's logic in his head.


The creative writer writes in bursts when first working on a piece. Generally when I'm writing a poem I sit with my laptop (occasionally moving to different places because I get sick of the same spot for more than about a half hour) and schizophrenically whisper to myself what I have written as I dart between the document and Thesaurus.com and push the thing out word-by-word onto the page. That's when I forget to shave.


Both revise. The essay-writer revises much less than the creative writer because I am generally dispassionate about essays and when I'm done with one I don't want to see it again. It's also because the way I write essays is a slow, cautious tread forward into my argument; no sentence appears without fitting into some previously-designed scheme. However, any creative piece I write sits in a document and I come back and back to it and continuously try to make it more perfect. I'm almost never done revising something creative I've written.


In both cases I start at the beginning. I can't not start at the beginning. I've learned that about myself. It's part of this sort of OCD I have.