Blog Post #2 - Ashley Shaw

For me writing is like a form of torture. I'm not good at it because I criticize my work until I give up and don't want to do it any more. But it's also like an escape from the world. When I write for me and just put what I'm feeling down on paper it helps me get out a lot of the pain and hurt and frustration I keep bottled inside of me. I'm not really sure what this says about me as a writer. Maybe that if given the opportunity to write what I want and not just for assignments I might be good at it. Maybe it says that since I can find a refuge in something I also think of as a prison that my life is a complicated mess of right and wrong, of good and bad. When I write all of my feelings down I jump from one thing to the next never really having any order or balance to it, you can't do that with assignments. When you're writing for class you have to have order and make it flow and make sense, but with all the ideas that flood my brain every second of everyday it's hard to make it all make sense. That's why I prefer reading instead. When I read something I can get so caught up in that world that I forget about my own. I'll forget about the pain and the hurt and the loss that I deal with on a daily basis and I'll just be caught up in the character's life. Like when I read The Fault In Our Stars for the first time, that book isn't hard to read so you sit down and start reading and then before you know it two hours have gone by, and you're so swept up in it that you can't stop reading. If I were to write for other people to read, that's what I'd want to do. Grab their attention and make it so that they don't want to put the book down.