I’ve always loved writing – the way it felt to imagine another world was like no other feeling. For high school, I decided to go to my city’s performing arts school so I could pursue Creative Writing. I have to say, it was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a creative sense. I got to explore my talent and receive amazing opportunities I wouldn’t have gotten at my neighborhood school. By senior year, I had published a chapbook of my work, edited an anthology/literary magazine, and won six regional awards for my writing. It was a thrilling time for me and allowed me to constantly explore different genres and types of writing.
Being in a class where you’re given a lesson and prompt every week, you rarely run out of ideas. The prompts we were given allowed us to write outside of our comfort zones and think of things we otherwise wouldn’t have written about. It was an amazing four years that, like everything, came to an end. And when that end to high school came, so did the end of my fiction/poetry writing. It became so difficult to write poems and short stories because I was out at an open sea without a map or compass now. Everything I tried to write I ended up deleting because I thought it was hot garbage. Slowly I began to stop writing prose and poetry altogether because eventually, I couldn’t even think of anything to write.
I had experienced mild cases of writer’s block in high school, every writer does. But I’d never experienced writer’s block quite like this. Not only did I stop writing, but I almost had a distaste for it because of how bad I felt about my skills at that point. That’s when I had the idea to try a different style of writing that wasn’t taught to me in high school: journalistic writing. With journalism, writers may experience writer’s block sometimes, but in the world of news, media, and columns, there is a world of things to write about, constantly being served to you.
When I applied to write for Her Campus FSU, I immediately felt like I found the right place to use my writing talents, which by August had become fairly rusty, but I was excited to try something new. In this case, my cure for what seemed like ‘world-ending writer’s block’ was to step further out of my comfort zone than I’d done before and into another world of writing. Sometimes it takes drastic measures like that to defeat writer’s block, and sometimes it just takes time or the perfect prompt to come along.
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