Fatmanonice
Banned via Warnings
Link to original post: [drupal=4199]Why I Write[/drupal]
Today marks the one anniversary of when I starting writing essays and posting them on Facebook. Since then, I have written 25 essays about varying topics that have been on my mind in the past year. There have been a few people that have asked me why I write and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to explain it.
I think one thing I need to explain first is my writing history. I first became interested in writing my freshman year of high school. I had a very supportive English teacher that year and I created my first major piece of creative writing. It was called Shadow Realm and the story involved a ragtag team of thieves in a post-apocalyptic city. It was supposed to be a six part story but I lost confidence in my writing skills (largely because of a teacher’s strong criticism) the spring semester of my freshman year of college and barely started the third part. The main reason I wrote the story was because, at the time, I wanted to be animator and hoped to bring it to life eventually. From my freshman year of high school to my sophomore year of college, I created five other story ideas:
1.“Everything You Know is Wrong”- Probably my favorite of all my story ideas. It’s about a small, loosely connected group of high school students (basically a nerd, Goth, hippie, and a ladies’ man) who accidently get involved in the spiritual world through lucid dreams. I wrote a good 100 pages for it before I lost my confidence in fictional writing. This story is stuffed to the brim with my weird sense of humor.
2. “Cosmic Disturbance”- A girl travels through time after narrowly surviving a school shooting and meets a lot interesting characters along the way including an 1980’s punk rocker, a female gangster of the 1920’s, a wooden tengu doll possessed by the ghost of a small boy, a mime, and a girl who can cast spells by reading certain Bible verses. It’s very loosely based on the video game Chrono Trigger. I never really came up with much of a plot for it but I enjoyed drawing the characters so much that I held onto the story idea.
3. “Matchmaker”- Through a series of strange events following the near death of her brother, a girl gains the power to fuse to objects to gain their characteristics and makes her the newest victim in a conspiracy that goes back to the Middle Ages. If you’ve ever seen the anime “Full Metal Alchemist”, her abilities are very similar to the character Wrath despite the fact that I started this story about a year and half before I saw that anime for the first time. After EYKW, this is the story I’d love to see eventually brought to life the most.
4. “My Inner Darkness”/”Twisted Sister”- An elementary school kid who’s afraid of just about everything befriends a bipolar demon who’s acted as both his guardian and tormentor since he was a baby. The two names are a result of not yet deciding whether the story should be serious or humorous in nature. In the serious version, it follows the kid into his teens where he gradually loses his grip on reality and in the humorous version the demon helps the kid overcome his fears and pretends to be his big sister in public.
5. “A.D.D.” (Alternate Dream Dimensions) - A clinical psychologist has a patient that sees wild hallucinations and eventually the psychologist begins to see them too, introducing him to a whole new world. This story has the least amount of development of all my stories and came about from a short story I wrote my freshman year of college.
Again, I’d like to continue these sometime in the future and I’d love feedback on which ones sound interesting. At this time, I still don’t have enough confidence in my writing abilities to go back to fictional writing. In my high school days, my parents believed the career that would best suit me would be journalism but I didn’t like the idea of writing for a living. Like cooking, I prefer it as a hobby and I didn’t want to burn out on something I enjoyed doing so much. I had written travel journals in Japan and England but I had written them for the sake of my parents. I dabbled in poetry for a time but it was mostly used as a way to vent. Writing was therapeutic for a time until I become overly conscious of my short comings and I began to associate the whole activity with stress.
What inspired me to write and share after about a two year break was actually being turned down by the only girl I’ve really had interest in at SEMO. I had asked her out the previous year but after looking around for other potential girlfriends for ten months, I came up empty (see my Valentine’s essay for more details on that) and decided to ignore common sense and tried again. I had intended to ask her after Finals’ week in May but my impatience got the best of me and after two days of being kept awake at night by my own emotions, I felt like I was going to bust if I didn’t tell her how I felt. I went through with it and only broke one of my person rules of asking someone out (those rules being: don’t use the “L” word, don’t gush or go into a sappy monologue, don’t beg/plead/make threats, do it in person, and only do it after realistically weighing potential pro/cons of the relationship). As a person who writes long winded essays, you can probably guess which one I broke. Looking back, I realize I did a ton of stuff wrong leading up to it (my essay titled "Honest Notes From an Honest Gentleman: 13 Ways Women Accidently Attract Men" is just as much as a personal lament as it is an in-depth analysis of everything I misinterpreted) but I think being able to admit to that now shows how much I’ve grown in the past year.
The first time I was turned down was when I relearned that short comings aren’t the end of the world. I had planned the first time out almost a month in advance but I didn’t know how I was going to react if things didn’t go the way I wanted. I was honestly afraid of lapsing back into the depression I had only gotten over about five months earlier but I came out unscathed. That night, the emotion I felt the most was relief because of how well I handled it. When I asked the second time, I felt a little beside myself when she said no. I felt like I was left in the middle of the desert with nothing but a pair of shoes. The message was clear: I had to keep walking, even if I never found anything.
I’ve had issues with closure for years and it didn’t really hit me about how severe it was until my guidance counselor at SEMO listened to my sordid life story and told me that I was literally afraid of it. She was right in a lot of ways. I quit drawing and gave up my dream of becoming an animator because I thought I was “too old” to ever get good at art. I quit martial arts because I was tired of arguing with my instructor over religious issues. I stopped singing in public in grade school due to relentless criticism from one of my grade school teachers. I quit playing the saxophone because I felt like I could never catch up with the skill of the members of my high school’s marching band. I let go of most of my high school friends because I didn’t want them to the see the loser that I thought I was going to become. For a time, I stopped looking for friends because I was afraid of rejection. Walking away from the Rec-Center the night I was turned down, I felt like I needed to take back something for myself. If I kept letting go of things that were important to me, I was going to eventually be left with nothing. I decided to do this through writing and I wrote “A Young Buck” the next day.
I suppose the question that needs to be answered now is why I write. I write for a number of reasons. The first is that I’m not a very interpersonal person. In describing me, people tend to say that I’m quiet, standoffish, or mysterious. These all work well and fine for Batman but for anyone else, it just shows that people don’t know very much about you and, in fact, that’s the case surrounding me. As my mom says, I tend to keep most people at arm’s length and I see writing as a way to shorten this distance. For what I want to do with my life, I need to be open in order to connect with a wide variety of people.
The second reason is because I see writing like some people would see photographs. Ever since a young age, I haven’t liked getting my picture taken and up until about two years ago, nearly every picture I was in was forced or taken without me knowing. Part of the reason for this is because I don’t want to be remembered by photographs. I want to be remembered by the actions I do and the people I impact. I’d rather be buried in an unmarked grave than have a full photo album full of pictures of me. Second, I believe writing is a far more accurate portrayal of someone. In writing, you read their thoughts and you get a better idea of who they are as a person. With photographs, you can usually only just guess the context unless you were actually there when the picture was taken. Because I see writing like photographs, I like to go back and read my old stuff from time to time to reflect on how I have changed and how I have stayed the same. Some of my older stuff makes me want to ralph (like some of my poetry from high school where I whine about being single) but it’s good to know that I don’t have an infatuated relationship with my writing.
The third reason I write is because I believe it has helped me gain back some of the confidence that I have lost over the years when it comes to other past hobbies. I’m slowly trying to get back into art and, little by little, I’m trying to update my story ideas so that when inspiration finally strikes, I’ll be able to rush out of the gate. I believe that writing leaves me vulerenable and that I’m risking some of my confidence too. For example, I had two very long arguments with my parents over “Looking into the Tiger’s Eye” and “Growing Up as a ‘Girl’ and What it Means to be a Man in America” because they believed I was being too open about my past. I share my writings online because I like feedback and to actually accomplish what I want to do in life, I believe I need to learn to be more accepting of criticism and not fall to pieces like I have in the past. As expected, some of my essays have gotten very heavy criticism (mostly on sites other than Facebook) but I believe I have learned from that criticism and have become better for it.
One final question that I’m often asked is why I include quotes at the end of all my essays. I do this for two reasons. The first reason is because I believe that wisdom can come from any religion, philosophy, or single person. I have a quote book on thinkexist.com with over 2,000 quotes from over 200 of history’s greatest minds and, to be expected, they represent a very wide range of opinions and beliefs. What’s even more interesting is how much many of them have in common and I believe that something valuable can be learned from all of them, even if you don’t agree with everything they say. The second reason I do this is to remind myself that my experiences are not unique and that some of my opinions and views line up with millions of different people throughout history. In a way, it’s become a way to combat “Blogger’s Syndrome” where you believe you’re important/unique/smart just because you make your opinions available to a large number of people on the internet. It gives me comfort that there have been people who have gone through similar things that I have and had similar thoughts, no matter how weird they are.
Today, I find myself in the same place where I have written most of my essays. I’m on the third floor of Kent Library with a toothpick in the corner of my mouth, my kangol hanging on the right side of the monitor, and smelling like sweat and gravy because I only got off work about an hour ago. Usually I spent 4-5 hours on a Saturday pounding out what’s been on my mind for the week. I imagine that this will continue being a habit and I certainly hope that it does because I’ve gained so much from it. I write to find strength and give strength. I write to be inspired and to inspire. I write to stay connected and to connect. I write to let others know who I am and discover who I am myself. This is why I write.
Fatmanonice, April 10th, 2011
“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.”- Sir Francis Bacon
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” –Socrates
“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- ''My Heart Laid Bare.'' But -- this little book must be true to its title.”-Edgar Allan Poe
Today marks the one anniversary of when I starting writing essays and posting them on Facebook. Since then, I have written 25 essays about varying topics that have been on my mind in the past year. There have been a few people that have asked me why I write and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to explain it.
I think one thing I need to explain first is my writing history. I first became interested in writing my freshman year of high school. I had a very supportive English teacher that year and I created my first major piece of creative writing. It was called Shadow Realm and the story involved a ragtag team of thieves in a post-apocalyptic city. It was supposed to be a six part story but I lost confidence in my writing skills (largely because of a teacher’s strong criticism) the spring semester of my freshman year of college and barely started the third part. The main reason I wrote the story was because, at the time, I wanted to be animator and hoped to bring it to life eventually. From my freshman year of high school to my sophomore year of college, I created five other story ideas:
1.“Everything You Know is Wrong”- Probably my favorite of all my story ideas. It’s about a small, loosely connected group of high school students (basically a nerd, Goth, hippie, and a ladies’ man) who accidently get involved in the spiritual world through lucid dreams. I wrote a good 100 pages for it before I lost my confidence in fictional writing. This story is stuffed to the brim with my weird sense of humor.
2. “Cosmic Disturbance”- A girl travels through time after narrowly surviving a school shooting and meets a lot interesting characters along the way including an 1980’s punk rocker, a female gangster of the 1920’s, a wooden tengu doll possessed by the ghost of a small boy, a mime, and a girl who can cast spells by reading certain Bible verses. It’s very loosely based on the video game Chrono Trigger. I never really came up with much of a plot for it but I enjoyed drawing the characters so much that I held onto the story idea.
3. “Matchmaker”- Through a series of strange events following the near death of her brother, a girl gains the power to fuse to objects to gain their characteristics and makes her the newest victim in a conspiracy that goes back to the Middle Ages. If you’ve ever seen the anime “Full Metal Alchemist”, her abilities are very similar to the character Wrath despite the fact that I started this story about a year and half before I saw that anime for the first time. After EYKW, this is the story I’d love to see eventually brought to life the most.
4. “My Inner Darkness”/”Twisted Sister”- An elementary school kid who’s afraid of just about everything befriends a bipolar demon who’s acted as both his guardian and tormentor since he was a baby. The two names are a result of not yet deciding whether the story should be serious or humorous in nature. In the serious version, it follows the kid into his teens where he gradually loses his grip on reality and in the humorous version the demon helps the kid overcome his fears and pretends to be his big sister in public.
5. “A.D.D.” (Alternate Dream Dimensions) - A clinical psychologist has a patient that sees wild hallucinations and eventually the psychologist begins to see them too, introducing him to a whole new world. This story has the least amount of development of all my stories and came about from a short story I wrote my freshman year of college.
Again, I’d like to continue these sometime in the future and I’d love feedback on which ones sound interesting. At this time, I still don’t have enough confidence in my writing abilities to go back to fictional writing. In my high school days, my parents believed the career that would best suit me would be journalism but I didn’t like the idea of writing for a living. Like cooking, I prefer it as a hobby and I didn’t want to burn out on something I enjoyed doing so much. I had written travel journals in Japan and England but I had written them for the sake of my parents. I dabbled in poetry for a time but it was mostly used as a way to vent. Writing was therapeutic for a time until I become overly conscious of my short comings and I began to associate the whole activity with stress.
What inspired me to write and share after about a two year break was actually being turned down by the only girl I’ve really had interest in at SEMO. I had asked her out the previous year but after looking around for other potential girlfriends for ten months, I came up empty (see my Valentine’s essay for more details on that) and decided to ignore common sense and tried again. I had intended to ask her after Finals’ week in May but my impatience got the best of me and after two days of being kept awake at night by my own emotions, I felt like I was going to bust if I didn’t tell her how I felt. I went through with it and only broke one of my person rules of asking someone out (those rules being: don’t use the “L” word, don’t gush or go into a sappy monologue, don’t beg/plead/make threats, do it in person, and only do it after realistically weighing potential pro/cons of the relationship). As a person who writes long winded essays, you can probably guess which one I broke. Looking back, I realize I did a ton of stuff wrong leading up to it (my essay titled "Honest Notes From an Honest Gentleman: 13 Ways Women Accidently Attract Men" is just as much as a personal lament as it is an in-depth analysis of everything I misinterpreted) but I think being able to admit to that now shows how much I’ve grown in the past year.
The first time I was turned down was when I relearned that short comings aren’t the end of the world. I had planned the first time out almost a month in advance but I didn’t know how I was going to react if things didn’t go the way I wanted. I was honestly afraid of lapsing back into the depression I had only gotten over about five months earlier but I came out unscathed. That night, the emotion I felt the most was relief because of how well I handled it. When I asked the second time, I felt a little beside myself when she said no. I felt like I was left in the middle of the desert with nothing but a pair of shoes. The message was clear: I had to keep walking, even if I never found anything.
I’ve had issues with closure for years and it didn’t really hit me about how severe it was until my guidance counselor at SEMO listened to my sordid life story and told me that I was literally afraid of it. She was right in a lot of ways. I quit drawing and gave up my dream of becoming an animator because I thought I was “too old” to ever get good at art. I quit martial arts because I was tired of arguing with my instructor over religious issues. I stopped singing in public in grade school due to relentless criticism from one of my grade school teachers. I quit playing the saxophone because I felt like I could never catch up with the skill of the members of my high school’s marching band. I let go of most of my high school friends because I didn’t want them to the see the loser that I thought I was going to become. For a time, I stopped looking for friends because I was afraid of rejection. Walking away from the Rec-Center the night I was turned down, I felt like I needed to take back something for myself. If I kept letting go of things that were important to me, I was going to eventually be left with nothing. I decided to do this through writing and I wrote “A Young Buck” the next day.
I suppose the question that needs to be answered now is why I write. I write for a number of reasons. The first is that I’m not a very interpersonal person. In describing me, people tend to say that I’m quiet, standoffish, or mysterious. These all work well and fine for Batman but for anyone else, it just shows that people don’t know very much about you and, in fact, that’s the case surrounding me. As my mom says, I tend to keep most people at arm’s length and I see writing as a way to shorten this distance. For what I want to do with my life, I need to be open in order to connect with a wide variety of people.
The second reason is because I see writing like some people would see photographs. Ever since a young age, I haven’t liked getting my picture taken and up until about two years ago, nearly every picture I was in was forced or taken without me knowing. Part of the reason for this is because I don’t want to be remembered by photographs. I want to be remembered by the actions I do and the people I impact. I’d rather be buried in an unmarked grave than have a full photo album full of pictures of me. Second, I believe writing is a far more accurate portrayal of someone. In writing, you read their thoughts and you get a better idea of who they are as a person. With photographs, you can usually only just guess the context unless you were actually there when the picture was taken. Because I see writing like photographs, I like to go back and read my old stuff from time to time to reflect on how I have changed and how I have stayed the same. Some of my older stuff makes me want to ralph (like some of my poetry from high school where I whine about being single) but it’s good to know that I don’t have an infatuated relationship with my writing.
The third reason I write is because I believe it has helped me gain back some of the confidence that I have lost over the years when it comes to other past hobbies. I’m slowly trying to get back into art and, little by little, I’m trying to update my story ideas so that when inspiration finally strikes, I’ll be able to rush out of the gate. I believe that writing leaves me vulerenable and that I’m risking some of my confidence too. For example, I had two very long arguments with my parents over “Looking into the Tiger’s Eye” and “Growing Up as a ‘Girl’ and What it Means to be a Man in America” because they believed I was being too open about my past. I share my writings online because I like feedback and to actually accomplish what I want to do in life, I believe I need to learn to be more accepting of criticism and not fall to pieces like I have in the past. As expected, some of my essays have gotten very heavy criticism (mostly on sites other than Facebook) but I believe I have learned from that criticism and have become better for it.
One final question that I’m often asked is why I include quotes at the end of all my essays. I do this for two reasons. The first reason is because I believe that wisdom can come from any religion, philosophy, or single person. I have a quote book on thinkexist.com with over 2,000 quotes from over 200 of history’s greatest minds and, to be expected, they represent a very wide range of opinions and beliefs. What’s even more interesting is how much many of them have in common and I believe that something valuable can be learned from all of them, even if you don’t agree with everything they say. The second reason I do this is to remind myself that my experiences are not unique and that some of my opinions and views line up with millions of different people throughout history. In a way, it’s become a way to combat “Blogger’s Syndrome” where you believe you’re important/unique/smart just because you make your opinions available to a large number of people on the internet. It gives me comfort that there have been people who have gone through similar things that I have and had similar thoughts, no matter how weird they are.
Today, I find myself in the same place where I have written most of my essays. I’m on the third floor of Kent Library with a toothpick in the corner of my mouth, my kangol hanging on the right side of the monitor, and smelling like sweat and gravy because I only got off work about an hour ago. Usually I spent 4-5 hours on a Saturday pounding out what’s been on my mind for the week. I imagine that this will continue being a habit and I certainly hope that it does because I’ve gained so much from it. I write to find strength and give strength. I write to be inspired and to inspire. I write to stay connected and to connect. I write to let others know who I am and discover who I am myself. This is why I write.
Fatmanonice, April 10th, 2011
“Write down the thoughts of the moment. Those that come unsought for are commonly the most valuable.”- Sir Francis Bacon
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.” –Socrates
“If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own -- the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple -- a few plain words -- ''My Heart Laid Bare.'' But -- this little book must be true to its title.”-Edgar Allan Poe
