Becoming a writer. And getting the guts to stay one.

I wrote this around 9 months ago. I decided to break down my writing. My style. What I want to accomplish. What I have. I've updated it some. So...I guess it's a personal essay...
I guess I need to start out by saying that I never imagined myself as a writer. Yes, I enjoy reading and often dreamt about imitating writers and their works, but I could not actually see myself doing that. I always put writing as a second priority to many first priorities. I often thought that writing was not really accomplishing anything. Until I started.
I started forcefully and strongly writing in the Fall of 2009. I had always journaled, but never put anything into permanency. In that fall semester, I took moments from daily life and documented them into writing. And I found it to be a release. I could write down exactly how I felt at a particular moment, and upon rereading that piece, I could completely recreate that feeling within me again. I did not ever realize that writing was such an emotional trigger. Yet, it really, really is. When I read novels, like other readers, I feel the emotions of the characters. I feel sadness when something happens to the protagonist or happiness when the protagonist is elated. So, I guess, at this point, I am defining words on a page as an emotional trigger. Like I said, reading just a few words can completely create a mental picture. Words are powerful.
As a writer, I want to use words to their strongest power. I do not want to just describe a car as red, but I want to call it fire-engine red, or candy cane red, or even…magenta. So, that is why I at first felt hesitation at writing. I felt that my writing was not good enough to go anywhere. If writing is published, it should be powerful. It should create revelations within the reader, it should make his or her skin tingle, and it should create emotion. I feared my writing would not do this. That it would lay still and lifeless on the page. Progressively though, I still do not feel that my writing is publishable, but I do feel it is readable.
My first shown-to-someone-else-besides-myself piece was a poem written about a woman I had seen outside a building on campus. I saw her one day and thought to myself: “Someone else needs to see her.” Since I had no camera and no guts, I walked back to my dorm room and wrote down her character sketch. She was disgusting and intriguing. She was a cliché and yet, she worked that cliché so well. She was a smoking, swearing, overweight, appalling woman. She had to be documented. So I wrote about her. I wanted to make her story somewhat unbiased, so I chose not to use many negative words to describe her. I worked hard at making the imagery of the poem less obvious and cliché. I tried to describe her abstractly, and describe her qualities as metaphors. To add class to her, I put the poem in the form of a villanelle. I felt this woman needed some class that she could not give herself and formality was the way to do it. It was blunt and was a pretty accurate character sketch.
I had written this piece with no barriers, I wrote her exactly like I had seen her. A year previously, I would not have been so honest. I would have held back. I would not have told the reader that I was staring at her. I would not have told the reader that I looked at her bare flesh hanging outside of the bottom of her shirt. I would definitely have made myself, the writer, seem less interesting in something so grotesque. But, I showed my piece to some and it was well-received.
I wrote this poem and turned it in to be work-shopped in my Creative Writing class. Had I know that we had to claim our pieces, I would have not turned in that one. The poem was read aloud, and my cheeks gave away my identity. Dr. Beggs asked who wrote this piece and I raised my hand. The feedback in the work-shop didn't slaughter me. The readers of this piece could actually see the woman. They could see how she looked by the way that I described her. I felt that these readers had the same emotion triggered in them that I had in me, when first seeing her. Truly, I felt successful in what I had tried to do with that piece.
From that piece onward, I wrote what I saw. If it was a fiction piece, then I wrote what I wanted to see. I tried to be descriptive while still remaining somewhat abstract. The word “cliché” has become known, in my mind, as a demon. I feel that I have worked hard; trying to write pieces that are visual and sensual. I write my pieces aiming at invoking emotions.
I still feel that I have so much work to do to become the writer I am happy with. I think first, I need life experience. I need to experience some things outside of this small university in Arkansas and go look at different subsets of people. I keep getting reminded of this multi-part documentary: The United States of Poetry. (You should go watch it. Please?) I need to meet those people, or at least observe them. I need to run into strangers that are not the typical Arkansans. I feel like I have experienced what I needed to from the South, while living my life in Arkansas, but I need to experience the other regions of the United States, and experience other places beyond the nation I'm currently residing in. I need to see a Tibetan and his daily religious practices. I need to see a homeless woman and how she cherishes what little she has. I need to see people that I cannot typify.
Secondly, I feel I need to write about something I am unfamiliar with. I have a certain style...and I need to shy away from that and write about things that make me uncomfortable. It will only make my writing stronger. It would provide a test. It would test my writing’s ability to fluctuate. In my fictional characters, I have fluctuated in age, but I have not yet fluctuated in gender or mindset. I do not believe I have ever written from the point of view of a naïve person. Most of my narrators speak directly to the reader and have outsider opinions about their own society. They seem to have this “better than my peers” complex. They provide insight to the reader and through this insight, are able to criticize their own societies. Maybe I need to explore a narrator that is just another mindless member of their society.
To sum up, I need to fix several things in my writing. Yet, I thoroughly enjoy the writing process, so that battle does not seem too difficult. I need confidence, I need experience, I need to explore the unfamiliar, I need to drop my limitations, and I just need to let the pen write (or let my fingers type). I genuinely think that with time, a better paycheck, and confidence, my writing will only progress.