Homework 6

"Write what you know" often leads to terrible stories because it doesn't necessarily mean there's a correlation between how much you know it and how much you like it. If you're not 100% engaged and enthusiastic about the topic at hand, the more you write about it/work on it, the more it will begin to feel like a tedious chore. The best stories are the ones from a place of love, not the ones that are simply the most technically efficient. Being a COMM Major can help lead to good forms of storytelling because many of the required classes have a form of leeway into what you are able to write about. The English classes in particular are good at this.

I'm actually surprised at the fact that I agree to a degree with Kleon about utilizing non-digital mediums to help expedite the creative process. On the surface I didn't find myself aligning with it, but I was able to draw on past experiences and find an example that works in that favor: I've written music review on the side for fun for many years, but over the past few years, the number of them have been far less frequent. I figured out that a large reason for that was because when I sit down to write them in a Word doc, they're so long that they often amount to a five+ page paper equivalent, and subsequently in a Pavlovian manner, my mind began to disassociate the fun aspect of why I did them in the first place and instead mold them in with college essays that I put off and generally dread writing.

Which leads nicely into the subject of procrastination. The Jessica Hische quote at the beginning of chapter 6 is exactly what I've long said about myself: I can do anything in the world as long as I'm avoiding school work. I to this day procrastinate most school work, and it's something that I try to work on but I am rarely able to quell.