How Does Writing Affect My Life

I mostly write for academic purposes, and never for entertainment. Writing is not as enjoyable for me as it is for others because of one potent memory from third grade. I was asked by the teacher to write a personal narrative about the exciting three month summer break that we had. I distinctly remember my classmates reciting their eventful summers when asked to share all the while I was dreading my turn to share. My family does not go on many vacations and I do not mind that fact, but every summer I do not have the "exciting and adventurous" summer break as everyone else. I prefer to relax in my house and sleep in late during the summer. So instead of writing a personal narrative, I wrote a fictional story of my summer. I kept my story realistic so that the fictional summer I had was believable. It was then that I had an epiphany that of all the writing styles, fictional writing would most likely be my strongest point. There is no limit in what can happen in a fictional story. How I see it is that I am limited to what I can experience in the outside world, so I can create my own fictional world in a way that fiction could almost be my alternate parallel realm.
Positive influences include talking to a peer before hand on what I am going to write about and see if he/she has any thoughts about my idea, editing periods before the writing assignment is due, and a reasonable time frame for the assignment. The factors that ruin writing for are if the assignment is a personal narrative because I do not believe I have an interesting story to tell, writing requirements such as a certain amount of pages or words, and forced research papers of random topics that I do not find