It would be wrong to say that at the beginning of this project I didn't know what to write about. The problem was I had no idea what I didn't want to write about. I didn't start out with one idea that I would whittle and build onto. I had to brush aside idea after idea until I found a scenario that I liked then I could start that process that many other people were doing ever since the beginning. And even then my idea was ever changing. It was really quite volatile but I like it that way. I am accustomed to writing in an open ended fashion (due to years of fan fiction) so having multiple mostly vague ideas was actually to my advantage. Like I've mentioned countless times before, I love writing so this project was just one big fun experience. I find writing fun! Otherwise I wouldn't do it on my free time. It's sort of an advantage when it comes to school. You beat the system in at least some aspect of you enjoy writing. The only tough thing about the project was killing my darlings. For those of you who don't know, this basically means I had to take things out of my story that I might of really really liked for the greater good of it. I mean I took out a whole character! And he wasn't just a side character he was one of the main characters in my set of three later reduced to two! So that was tough, especially since his namesake was a reference to one of my favorite characters from the book Cryptonomicon. This was just one of the many changes that I HAD to make between my first and final draft. When you're a writer one of the most important things that you have to be able to do is admit what you made, may not be perfect just yet. As a matter of fact, it's pretty much guaranteed that your first draft will always be crap. However, I have personally always used the word crap in the positive and negative connotations. Writing this crappy version of your story is a very important step in the writing process. You can't nitpick every sentence and attempt to make your story perfect on the first try, it doesn't work like that. The crappy draft isn't necessarily bad. That counts especially with my writing style where I spew out all my ideas onto the paper and go down on that. In this manner I managed to go from eleven pages of below average writing to seven pages of writing that I could be proud with. And that's the funny thing, I could show people my rough draft and be proud of it just because I have that mentality, that mentality is very important in any good writer. If you wish to do anything worthwhile in writing then you gotta live by it. Too be honest I realized most of this while I was writing this piece specifically. I mean I already knew these things beforehand and I applied them to how I wrote, but it wasn't until this project that I was really able to put it into words. Really understanding a concept is fundamental for using said concept in your everyday life. So I hope that this mindset is one that I will be able to carry on into all of the writing that I do in the future. All in all I really enjoyed this project and I hope I get to do more writing projects in the future.
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