What is Writing?

After interviewing three different people I got to hear different thoughts and takes on what writing really is, and how people think and feel about writing.

After interviewing everyone, two people saw writing plain and simple as something you just have to do. They mainly viewed writing as papers and essays that you do for school. The last person, however, had a much different take. She viewed writing as a means of expression, something that can be enjoyable and that can put thoughts down on to paper. For me personally, as someone who wants to go into advertising, I relate most to the last person in relation to what writing is to me. I view writing as a way to express myself and be creative, to explore the unexplored.

Everyone I interviewed seemed to have different ideas of where their writing takes place; however, they all had one thing in common. The surrounding area had to be silent for all of them. This is something I can concur with. It’s hard enough to write when you have complete silence, adding noise into the mix can often times make writing even more difficult because of silly distractions.

Most people said they write only when they have to. They mentioned doing papers for school again, like research papers. One person did an actual publication of a sort with a professor from his school. One person was more artistic when she writes. She said she’ll write songs, or short stories, or poems, although the short stories and poems she said she writes mostly for school. For me, I like to write all sorts of things. I’ll write short stories, poems, texts, emails, ideas for advertisements. In fact, the way I see it, the best advertisements are short stories. They’re fun and involve a lot of creativity.

For the most part, everyone had different thoughts about what they like and dislike about writing. A couple of people mentioned they like the creativity aspect of writing, but then followed it up with disliking writer’s block which is something I completely relate to. I enjoy the creative aspects, but being creative isn’t always easy. Another person went on to say he likes what you get out of writing. In other words, he admired the learning aspect of writing. He figured that writing typically requires research and therefore naturally encourages you to learn something new. However, he also said that he dislikes when he’s forced to write about something that bores him.

What’s interesting about hearing other people’s thoughts on writing is that it shows just how broad and multifaceted writing really is. Writing can be a lot of different things for a lot of different people depending upon who you ask.

When it comes to composing versus writing, the main responses I got was that composing is more artistic and writing is more broad, which I completely agree. I think when you compose you have some sort of creation in mind whereas writing can be literally anything from a text to a novel.