The joy of writing

I never really knew how to write when I was a kid. Well, who does? What I mean is, I cannot really put some sense and coherence of the words that I know of to make a harmonious story. I was just envious of my sister who knows how to write articles in a nice and engaging way. She always had this gift of making something out of a pen and a paper, of putting the right words in the right way. She was the Editor in Chief of our school's newspaper. For me, I struggled on how to write.

image from www.aacc.edu

Fortunately I was chosen to be trained during my elementary years to join a writing contest. The category I had was News Writing and Feature Writing. News writing was somehow easy. All you had to remember was 4Ws (what, when, where, why) and 1H (how). It is a very factual and straight to the point kind of writing. Feature Writing was more challenging.

With writing feature articles, you can choose any topic under the sun -whatever comes to mind. All you have to do is to translate your thoughts into right words and stick it into the paper. For some this is easy. For me, uhmm, not quite.

image from www.cse.chalmers.se

Being a wide reader may help in writing. I'm a wide reader but it seems the words would elude me when I try to put my thoughts down. How I wished thoughts could become bubbles, like in the cartoon strips. One can catch them and just paste them on paper. But no, I have to try hard to think of appropriate words, think of how to construct a sentence and a paragraph. For some it may be easy, for some it may not. For me, I learned and am still learning through practice. 

In this day and age where bloggers are sprouting everywhere and people are able to share what is in their mind at any time, anyone can become a writer. What matters is, being able to write from the heart. Being able to write from the unstoppable thoughts on one's head that seem unrested until given a vent. To my readers out there who would love to write about things they want to share to the world, the only difficult thing is beginning. Once you get the hang of it and find your own style, the words will flow. Writing is freeing me from becoming an isolated person as I now can share what I think and what I feel. This is how I found the joy of writing.