When I was younger, I used to write fictional stories. I loved creating characters and building plots and spent countless hours writing. When I entered high school, I lost a lot of my passion for writing. Although I'm not quite sure why, I think it may be because my teachers never gave me opportunities to write creative pieces. In addition to this, I lost a lot of confidence in my abilities when I saw that others were very skilled writers. Recently, I've been trying to find my way back to loving writing and remembered a few of my favorite things about it.
Firstly, writing has the option of being honest. A lot of people say that being honest is a must-have in writing, but I don't completely agree. Although honest pieces are touching and heartwarming, there is a certain charm in pieces of writing that are really out there. I've always believed that when you write, you do not have to be yourself -- you don't have to be the person everyone sees you as or the person you believe you should be. You can be bitter, greedy, jealous, or angry in your writing. You can make your characters pessimistic or unkind. There are no rules to how fictional your characters can be or how similarly it must reflect your life and your morals.
I haven't felt it in a while, but I used to get a weird feeling of euphoria when I wrote. I would get sucked into whatever I was writing that day and would feel completely content as I wrote for hours. When I wrote, it felt like time stopped. And when I snapped out of my daze to check the time, I was almost always surprised at how much time had passed. These days, I get bits of this feeling, though it's rare. I think the last time I felt like time stopped while I was writing was when I was writing a screenplay for my screenwriting class last semester -- for once, I was really happy with my plot and characters and was proud of what I had written and it seemed like I wrote in all in ten minutes (even though it really took four+ hours).
Lastly, I love how writing is a healthy outlet. I recall getting angry and frustrated and saying, "I need to write." I would sit down on my floor or lay on my bed and write out a story with a theme that revolved around my feelings at the time and it was a great way to express my negative emotions -- I didn't have to yell at the people I was upset with or hit something repeatedly. The most physically grueling action I performed was typing aggressively, and I don't really consider that to be much of a problem.
There are endless components of writing that I love, and these a few things. Though they may seem cliche, they are absolutely true. I spent my younger years writing away a lot of my feelings, and I think this may have benefitted me because by writing out my feelings throughout the years, I'm able to not only look back at my old work and think about what I need to improve/change about myself and my thinking, but I attribute my ability to communicate with others to writing (even though I communicate with certain people better than others).
