Dear Young Writer,
Is there any way to enjoy writing a research paper?
Here’s the thing: you research all the time. There’s never a second you aren’t investigating. Your friend’s facebook status changes to “In a Relationship“. A mini research project begins. Who are they dating? Let me check the comments. Ah, no one has answered yet. How about his/her profile? No clues. How about their pictures? YOU ARE RESEARCHING. Why? Because you are curious. Something about that information is like a muddy footprint to our inner gum-shoe. It’s a mystery. You are a detective. You are going to research it.
People love a good piece of writing. Now, I don’t mean a piece of writing that someone was forced to write or a piece of writing that someone was bored when writing. Love is a contageous thing. Write beacuse you love. You love something. Anything. Write about it. (If you don’t believe me, find out how much money J.K. Rowling has in the bank. That figure is not the result of a Ponzi scheme or even a genius marketing campaign. That figure is a reflection of how much we love the world she let us into.) Your heart, like the clouds, fills up with tension until it eventually bursts and showers its content on every brick and breath in shooting-range. Fill it with imagination, static, curiousness and love. Fill it with gallons and gallons to christen the blank page with to baptize your thought in ink.
Don’t waste your time or your effort meeting expectations. Spend your time being brave. Be one of Walt Whitman’s “Pioneers! Oh, Pioneers!” Don’t be afraid to think! Go out onto the edge of the most precarious limb of a subject and test its strength. Writing isn’t fun when you’re playing on the safe side. No one really wants to read. Take your assignment and think outside of the box. Dump out all its contents and change the way you look at it. Sure, some prompts seem more “dull” than others but that is just a manifestation of narrow-mindedness.
When life hands you something to anxiously be excited over, something you can think about and roll around in your mind like a piece of hard candy until it dissolves, receive it with open arms and love every minute of it. That thing that you’re thinking about, that you’re bothered by or excited about, write about it. Unless you completely shut off your mind in class, there is something that makes you itch. There is something that drives you mad. Take that confusion, that torutre, that thing that gets you fired up and research it. Examine it. Unless you shut your mind off, there is something that you are curious about. Take your inqusitivness and research the thing that doesn’t make sense to you. Explore it. Have some guts. No one ever made any progress coloring inside the lines. Allow yourself to get messy.
Go ahead! Roll up your sleeves! Have the courage to glare at the assignment and find something in-between your thoughts that is a gray area, a mystery you can unravel. Deny narrowed-mindness and refuse to shut off your brain.
Think. Explore. Unravel. Break all the rules, but get to the bottom of it.
xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe
via img.4chan.org
Have you ever had a feeling that you weren’t good enough for what you wanted to do.
Ever felt that ultimately you’d be judged and laughed at and thrown aside.
I feel that this sentiment had been the undertone of a lot of what I did. But I know its changing. And I know this because of my ACTIONS. I’m not caring what becomes of what I do, just as long as I do it, and give it my best shot. It’s not until you stand up and do something that you can validate any feeling you have. I’ve been patient for a long time, but now, this is the time to make it happen.
Fast Food: Calories Per Dollar
