I write because it can be about anything.
Growing up, writing was never my strong suit. I hated having essays to write for school. I was never that good at writing, and so it made English my least favorite subject. I had always liked math, since it had a straight answer, while English had many interpretations. I had always felt very repetitive in my writing, like I was finding seven ways to say the same thing. It didn’t help that my dad was a sports journalist, my mom taught English, among other things, to preschoolers, and my brother was a straight A student. I felt frustrated by my writing that I didn’t compare. I started to dislike writing because of that.
But I realized later that I would write a lot. I was always making lists, maybe sometimes too many. I liked to list out things that interested me, or things that I thought were important. These lists organize my thoughts and help me focus on a topic, since I usually get sidetracked quickly. I also would sometimes write little stories that I had made up. They were silly stories that didn’t usually make sense and weren’t very good. But I had liked writing them. Most commonly, I would journal. Journaling was my favorite form of writing. I always had a diary or a journal that I would write in. I still keep them. I don’t write in it every day. It is usually just when I feel like it. To me, journaling allows me to relax and to organize my thoughts about what happened on a given day and how I felt about it.
This might make my writing process a little weird. I tend to start by just writing. No editing. I write down everything that I want to say in my paper in one go. I get it all out either on paper or on my word doc. Then I go back and edit it. I fix mistakes, delete things, or add more to the paper. This works somewhat because it gets everything I want to say into the paper. This sometimes doesn’t work because since I get everything I want to say said, I don’t always reach the page limit. Now I have to struggle to get to that page limit or word count and have to figure how to extend my paper. If I had to describe what type of writer I am, I would say I am the type that procrastinates until it is due and then write it all in a few hours. I guess I thrive under pressure.