%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 |  A journey of self-improvement - or not. |
|
Sup? I'm Char. You may know me from timeless classics such as
and
I blog for things like
[Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Believin' all the lies that they're tellin' ya Buyin' all the products that they're sellin' ya They say jump and ya say "how high?" Ya braindead, ya got a fuckin' bullet in ya head |
Artist: Depeche Mode Song: Enjoy the Silence [Embed For Use By Upgraded+] Prompt via "30-Day Blogging Challenge ON HIATUS"  : Regarding your craft of writing, is there something specific you want to improve on or give more attention? What steps will you take to motivate yourself? I mean, at this point the biggest thing I need to do is write. I can't express how difficult it has been the past few years to write a research paper on corporate fraud and then turn around and try to do creative writing five minutes later. It just straight up doesn't work for me. Every time I try to write something, financial or business terms just start slipping into the poem completely without my consent. I'm surrounded by certain verbiage all day and when I try to shrug that off and write something unrelated, the language is still present. It's like talking to my brother. He talks like a lawyer all.the.time. He can't help it. Ever since he went through law school, it completely changed his cadence and his word choice. To me, it's like learning any new language. You can unlearn it unless you stop using it. When you're using it all the time, you're exercising that muscle and it's almost reflexive for that new language to spill out. I've tried writing quite a bit. It's partially a lack of time during the semester, but it's mostly that when I do write something, it's very heavy on business school lingo and I just end up hating it. Case in point: "Invalid Entry" . Written April 1st. I don't think there's any one specific thing I want to improve. If I could creatively write at all and be halfway content with it, I'd settle for that. It's one of those situations where you could advise a friend, but can't take your own advice. Like, if I were talking to someone else in my situation, I'd be like, well, hey, just write whatever you can write and you'll slowly be able to phase out the professional lingo. But I'm not able to get myself to actually do that. But, it's summer break now.  I don't really get a full break as summer classes have just started and I'm also working, but it's a break comparably speaking to the spring and fall semesters. I plan to get back into the habit of writing, and here's my plan for doing that: Blogging. It doesn't always help inspire my creative writing, but it connects me to the WDC community which often inspires me to be more involved with some of the creative writing challenges on the site. Naturally, you just talk to more people and see more activities going on around the site. Blogging doesn't really quench my writing thirst the way a poetry challenge or writing a short story does. I love blogging though and I'm 100% sure I would not have stuck around the site had it not been for finding the blogging community within WDC. Journaling. I'm trying to get back into personal journaling. I'm pretty honest in my blog, but nothing even comparable to the things I'll write about in a journal. Here, I'll skirt around a topic without calling it by name and it will go quietly unnoticed usually. In my personal journal, I'll lay allll the shit out on the line in explicit detail because I'm the only one reading it. What I like about journaling is not only the collection of memories to look back on, but also the fact that it helps clear my mind and give me space for other things, like creative writing, for example.  Baby steps. As I said, I've not written much at all in the past few years. It's tempting to try to throw myself headfirst into big projects or commitments, but I'm not about that right now. I'm trying to keep my commitments to a minimum so that I won't get overwhelmed and give up before I've given myself a proper chance to start. Instead of saying, okay, I'm gonna do this year-long challenge, I'm trying to make more realistic goals. Like, maybe I'll enter this one time contest. Or maybe I won't enter at all. Maybe I'll write something using the contest's prompt and keep it to myself for now. Sometimes you really have to reduce your plans to almost nothing just to get things rolling, and I'm totally prepared to do that. Reading. We've all heard it, you can't write if you don't read. Countless writers have said it in a myriad of ways. If you want to improve your writing, you have to expand your reading. I have a stockpile of books I've been intending to read for years. Last year, I only managed to read maybe 10 books. This year, so far, I've only read 2 and we're in May.  But with more time on my hands, I'm hoping to read 5 books over summer. That should put me on track to read 10 books again this year.  Other hobbies. I think other hobbies are just as important to writing as actually writing. Things like watching movies, going to concerts, seeing friends... They all have the potential to spark writing ideas. I mean, at least 80% of the poems I write are just straight from personal experience. I like to tell a story with everything I write, and the more things you do, the more stories you have to write. I also think it's a good idea to not focus all of your effort into one thing because it comes off as forced to me. And forced isn't fun. That being said... Force. If all else fails, you sometimes do have to force yourself to start and see where it goes. What I need is to be able to just write something without judging myself on what I wrote. It's a control issue, like, I don't want to write something if it's not at least halfway decent. I'd rather just not write at all. I've had that mentality for a long time and that's what has created my dry spell in writing. So, if I have to force myself to write just to get back into the habit, that's what's going to happen, whether I like it or not.  Words like violence Break the silence Come crashing in Into my little world |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
