Writing

Everyone has their own particular style of writing. I have taken many Creative Writing College Courses over the years. The first one I took was likely around 1987 at a community college. I had taken many English College level classes before this since the late 1960s but since I wanted to hone my skills in 1987 I took this specific Creative Writing Class. The problem with Creative Writing Classes is they usually don't transfer to a 4 year college from a community or city college. So, if you take these courses you have to just be wanting to develop your writing skills. I suppose if you are already an English major at a 4 year institution and they have a Creative Writing Course then that would be different.

For me, writing has always been something I love to do. It is like having a conversation with someone new because when you write something, when you read it a day, week, month, year, or years later I always am surprised by what I wrote in my mind set of when I wrote it. It is always fun for me.

I suppose if you are a perfectionist it might be difficult though. For example, my wife always wants to edit what I write and change everything because she has a master's degree in Business. But, she doesn't have a blog site where she writes because everything would have to be so perfect that she never would publish anything because it would take so much time to get it perfect it wouldn't be fun for her. Also, she was valedictorian of her Prep School High School also. So, you get the idea of what I'm saying here.

Whereas with me I just love writing and then later reading what I have written. For me, it is sort of like a conversation you might have with someone on a bus or waiting for a bus. It is just fun learning about stuff together and communicating. However, in regard to communicating though I can be very talkative after I have spoken with someone for 5 to 10 minutes or so, often I'm not comfortable communicating much with someone I have never met before for the first 5 or 10 minutes until I totally figure out who they are and decide what side of myself I want to show them. This is likely because when I was growing up in the 1950s I met people who tried to kill me with a knife at my throat. So, it takes me 5 or 10 minutes still to ascertain whether someone is safe to communicate with or not. So, since two people were crazy enough to put a knife to my throat and tell me that they planned to cut my head off and stayed crazy for a half hour or so that does tend to change the way you see people. Mostly for me what it did was to realize why abortion is so important so people this awful get aborted before they are driven out of their minds by parents who hate them like it was in the 1950s and before.

So, writing for me is not only communicating with my future self it is about helping people. I have always tried to help people all my life. Partly this is because I was always big for my age and so had the physical stature to scare people into not harming other people my age. I was also not only tall but very strong too. So, unless someone was several years older than me with a weapon they were planning to harm or kill me with I could stand up to them and make them back down or I could rescue people from being harmed and get them to run away with me so we both would live. There were a lot more really crazy people in the 1950s in some ways than now that could be very violent without provocation. World War II had something to do with this. It made a lot of people really crazy from PTSD as it is called now.

Writing was always a way for me to express feelings that I might not want to talk to others about. Sometimes there are people who you can trust to talk to about things and sometimes there is no one. So writing for me was a way to get my emotions out on paper so I could re-read what I had written when I was upset and reflect and make better decisions when I was calmer later. This I found really helpful at many points in my life. So, I would like to say writing what you feel down might later save your life.