Finals week reprieve--Strengths

As I understand it form my peers:

As a writer, my strength lies in description and attention to detail. I really focus on things, often times to the detriment of a story. I know this, and I don't know why I do it. I have to consciously reign it in, because people don't want to read that unless it is pertinent to the story.

Left to my own devices I would just describe the hell out of something and have the glimmer of a plot that would tie multiple descriptions together, and the flow of the language and words would be enough to enjoy.

I don't know why I am interested in describing things. It's the poet in me I guess. I have mostly written poetry recently with Advanced poetry and Prose poetry both this quarter, which would mean I have taken mostly poetry classes overall despite my nonfiction emphasis. And as it turns out prose poetry is really good for meditations, descriptions and sounds. So I can get my kicks with prose poetry and write other things.

Another strength I have is my intellect. I am not saying this to brag. I have a high intelligent quotient which allows me to learn new things quickly and remember a lot of stuff. The trick is to take that stuff and present it in simple terms to share with a reader how/why it matters. I oftentimes use my knowledge and intellect to place things in my writing to distract from the fact that I don't have much to say. I use this often, and I have gotten into this habit so much that I use it in social situations and around people. I do it to add to the conversation, not to be pretentious and say, "Hey look what I know that you don't," for example I was talking poetic theory with a friend and I quoted Aristotle's Poetics to make a point, and my friend said it was really cool that I was able to accurately quote Aristotle poignantly because it added to the conversation. One time in advanced fiction class we did an exercise where we given words and had to write a story. One of my words was "Wolf" Earlier that day I had learned there were less than 250k wolves left in the wild, so I put that in there and Erin said, "Only Brian would know something like that. It's totally him." Later we talked about it and I said it was this thing that I milk, like an udder, to fill my story up. She said hers was digressions. I like her digressions, she likes my random ass knowledge, so I guess I should embrace it as distinctly mine and incorporate it more often. Some people, Erin included, like to learn stuff when they read. I do too, so I regularly include stuff that I think most people don't know. Which causes me to over look or pass things up that I think aren't interesting enough to write about and find things that are eccentric and eclectic and oftentimes obscure.

Couple all this with my desire to have a lot of love and attention and you have my reason for writing. I write to entertain, to teach, and to have people tell me how cool it was, or how much they enjoyed it. I don't know why I do this. I must be odd. I want to be the smart guy in the room, but not the asshole smart guy.

It can be a fine line and I am good at walking it.