This was my first extended experience in creative writing, and like most writers, I figured I should have a mysterious sunset for the accompanying photo for at least one of my articles. Like most other people I had to do it a tiny bit in high school or college English classes, but this was the first time I had to churn something out once a week. Let’s be honest. I had five good ideas. When I was asked to do this during the summer I thought about it for the day and I came up with four of those ideas in one day. So, the next day I decided that I was in since I had been able to come up with what seemed to me to be four good ideas for writing pieces. Turns out, I made a mistake. I wrote those four decent pieces and was able to come up with one, maybe two more if you’re feeling generous. The rest of the semester was filled with a bunch of pieces that I pretty much just wrote to fulfill my weekly requirement.
The few good pieces were good because they were ideas I had in August that I was able to spend some time thinking about and put time into the product because they were based off of ideas that I was excited about writing. Once the ideas that I really thought I had something special ran out, the quality dropped (and so did the length of the articles, oops).
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I tried to avoid the beat to death topics like being stressed in college or drinking too much coffee during finals week. In hindsight maybe I should have just done those ideas when it became more of a struggle for me to come up with writing topics.
I learned that in order to be a good writer on a really consistent basis, you have to open up to a degree which I do not like to open up to. That is a big part of the reason that I ran out of material to write on. I was able to write some fairly entertaining stuff (in my opinion) on pretty superficial topics. Things like the Farmers article, Names, Roommates and Vacations.
After those first four or so articles my mother asked me if I might be interested in doing a little writing for our local paper for some side money once I move home. I’m pretty sure that now, at the conclusion of the semester, she no longer thinks that’s a good idea.
The most uncomfortable writing I did was the deepest. Like I said before, what I now believe after this experience is that the best writing is when the author opens up in a real and meaningful way because readers are then able to connect with the work in a real and meaningful way. I hate opening up in general, so it did not surprise me when I found that I especially hated the idea of opening up in a public online setting. Why do I get along with my dad so well? There are a lot of reason, but one is because I often don’t even have to tell him things because we know each other that well. So, me, who doesn’t even like opening up to one person in a private setting is supposed to open up to potentially hundreds of people, some of which I may not even know on the internet? Yeah, right. Not a chance.
Regardless, I gained some degree of understanding for what writers do. And not unlike much of my time in college, I figured out yet again that I made the correct choice being a farmer rather than a writer. Just like I made the proper choice choosing to be a farmer rather than anything relating to the science class I took freshman year. Or anything I have to be in a big city to do. Or shop anywhere besides Home of Economy.
Thanks for reading over the semester!
Signing off, Andrew Haugen.
