Blog #2

For me, writing is like having to eat something you don’t like, you have to do it and at the same time you don’t enjoy doing it. The only times I write is when a teacher tells me I have to do so. I have never done it in another way. I think the biggest reasons I have this feeling about it is because I have always been forced to write, and mostly on things that were given and not really things I wanted to write on. During my three years in high school in Switzerland (I don’t know if it is the same in high schools in the USA), all the writing stuff we were doing in French was either analyzing a sentence on a five paragraph model during four hours or analyzing a poem or a two to three pages passage of a book we had previously read. For me, this is not exciting at all especially that I have never had very good grades that could have encouraged me a little bit.

Sometimes, I think that the last couple of words I have just written are very good and that they are going to help me find a good way to continue writing, and this is probably the only moment I enjoy writing, because I know what I want to write then. But when after a little while I reread them, I realize that I was too enthusiastic and that what I have just written is actually, not poor, but probably not that exceptional as well. All my enthusiasm then goes away and I am twiddling my thumbs while asking myself what I could possibly write to make my paper look a bit better. This doesn’t really fit in my metaphor because I don’t think that when you taste something you first think it is good and then you change your mind and find it bad, but I couldn’t find one that was imaging all of that at the same time.

I hope to be able once to enjoy writing from the beginning to the end of a text, even though I know it is going to be hard to achieve. To write without a specific form to stay in is already more enjoyable to do than what I have experience until now, I therefore don’t lose hope!