Portrait of a Writer

The art of writing can be a difficult task when it gets to the fact that you are the writer and you are aiming the paper to a specific reader. I can see myself as a good writer, I have no problem capturing my ideas down on paper, nor explaining them with detail. I like writing but it’s not something that I would do for a living or for a hobby, sometimes I do it as an occasional thing, very uncommon of me though. My writing abilities vary a lot, for me the genre, type of writing and assignment; tend to modify my thoughts and feelings towards the paper.
Since the beginning of my education, writing essays and papers has been really interesting and fun for me, until some teachers brought me down or critiqued my work in a really harsh and tough way. For example, there was this time, when I was a freshman during high school, in which we needed to do an essay involving our activities during the weekend and the hobbies that I used to do. So I wrote down about sports, music and other activities, I was really excited about it and I actually thought that I did really well, until I got my paper back, and discovered that my grade was a C. Getting a C in my paper really made me feel kind of bad and down, but I talked to the teachers about it and he gave me some extra credit assignments that involved some extra papers and essays that had a lot to do with my experiences during school, and bullying, but hey at least I learned and practiced more about essays, and I did them, and I got a C, and then a B because my writing skills improved a little.
After some years of taking a lot of English courses and writing classes, I got quite better at it, even better than some students that focused a lot at writing, I could just do essays and essays if I wanted to, but is not my ambition. The writing problems and mind-block problems came along during my senior year of high school. I was supposed to do a lot of essays to be ready for my college applications, so I practiced a lot every day, more and more, until I got a pretty decent syntax, grammar, and spelling. And writing actually became a healthy and useful habit later on my life.
Usually when I write I tend to write the first paragraph and based on that, write the whole story or essay in one attempt. The complexity of my words and the lexicon of it might not be the best around, but my ideas communicate by themselves, and that’s what I look for, that my audience understands and finds no problems getting why I try to say. When I have an assignment where I need to be specific and fixed, I really give it some time to it, for I really like how my ideas get together and how I write them down once I know where and what to write. If I block during the paper or at the very end of it, usually I go look for some help of anyone around, and I ask them to read it and to give me any advice about how can I fix certain problems or where can I put or add certain things if I’m not pleased with my work.
My whole writing abilities and skills in general are good, they are what a teacher expects to see, but sometimes I need to break some rules in order to be happy with my work. Usually I use about 3 or 5 really long sentences, and not five to seven sentences as I was taught, my syntax is most of the time correct but I rearrange everything expecting the readers or audience to be familiarized with it. Once I got everything set, and ready to go, I revise it and read it out loud, just to make sure that I’ve done a good job, I search for content first, order, grammatical and finally technical problems at the end, just to not lose my creativity and pace. If I ever have a really tough and difficult problem at the end of my paper, I usually change the whole thing, trying to get the better outcome of my creativity possible, and write it down ready to go.

Auto-ethnography
After analyzing my recordings I noticed that a lot of distraction might happen inside my head, and during the recordings, therefore that means that most of the time when I sit down to write a paper, a lot of distractions and external factors caught my attentions in the past, taking me out of focus of my writing objectives. One of the main things that I noticed in my recordings was the fact that I tend to eat a lot during my writing process, and I don’t know why, maybe that helps my mind to concentrate or something but usually I have some water with me and some chips or snacks to just keep it running and don’t getting up and making my paper in one sit. Besides the eating and the distractions, the last thing I noticed during my writing process is the concentration in revising and analyzing as I write.
The revising of my recordings made me realize that I focus a lot on what goes out my hands first and then what comes out of my head, which is wrong because what I really want is the ideas inside my head to be on the paper and expressed crystal clear, the best way possible. My strengths with this factor is that by the time I revise the paper and read it once or twice, I remember the ideas I had in mind and I add some and insert them into my paper just to make it shine as I originally wanted to. Usually in the middles of my recordings by the minute 11-13th, I had a stream of consciousness and some flashbacks that really helped, because I like to think very deeply into my thoughts and go inside my memories to extract the most I can out of them, for I like giving examples of my past, and make my audience and readers project themselves and lead their minds into my thoughts.

About three fourths of my recordings I star to wrap everything up, and it’s funny because I always end with some introduction and summary of what I have written. And now that I’ve mentioned it, once I listened to my recordings I thought about the rules I was supposed to follow and everything that I’ve learned, and I was impressed that I have ignored a lot of rules, but I also followed some of them unconsciously. It seems that the rules that I have set as default rules, are the syntax of an essay and the construction of paragraphs, but ironically those are the ones I ignore the most. I contradict myself following rules throughout the paper, finishing it, revising and ignoring those rules back again, it’s funny! I ignore most of the times the grammar errors because I consider them, “secondary” errors, and I tend to leave those to the very end of my paper.
My primary errors and the ones that I focus to fix as soon as possible are the ideas and clarity of my thoughts and expressions. My recordings revealed the true essence of my thoughts and consciousness, I found it really helpful to go back and listen to myself and taking notes on that because now, I have identified my errors, mistakes, and strengths I need to improve to make a better performance on my paper. The process of writing I have in mind now differs a lot from the one I had before the portrait of a writer, since I had a really concrete and closed mind before reading, Sommers, Perl, and many writers in my English class. I have taken the advices and lectures that we read in the past into practice on my own, and realizing that I can do a really descent job writing any paper, for I have the skills now and more wisdom about the topic, maybe if I do some research and I elaborate a little bit more, I would be a pretty decent writer later on, and I’m proud of my improvement within these past weeks.

One of the strengths I’m most proud of is the fact of my creativity and ability to make any paper about many topics within a narrow window of time. My technique, based on my recordings, is, sitting down, get some food, water and start typing the things that just come out of my mind and the words that my fingers type or write. It has worked out for me my whole life, and so far I have had no problems with my personal method of writing process, but obviously some feedback and polishing is needed before turning any assignment in. I feel that I really need some feedback, I’m good taking the honest and constructive critiques of my peers and the people around me, because the more feedback I get, the more I know how am I supposed to write my paper to make it perfect or at least readable.
Now I can say that my techniques are not that awful compared with some of the professional writers, obviously is not my major, and I just do it for fun and assignments, but hey, I’ve seen many improvements in my writing skills since the “portrait of writer” and the recordings itself, because it really works, analyzing and actually thinking about it, I know it sounds dumb, and pretty obvious but I used to just write, revise grammar and turn whatever I have in, and now I have developed a whole process in planning, revising, editing, summarizing and think outside my egocentric mind. I felt empathy with a lot of college writers that I have read about, because some of their struggles and problems are pretty similar with mines, but now I have surpassed them, and turned them into improvements throughout my paper.