A jumbled post about writing

I have this bizarre love/hate relationship with writing that I'm not sure is entirely normal. I wonder if it would be the same if I didn't have an unfortunately strong penchant both for procrastination and perfectionism, at least when it comes to starting things, but as it is most writing I do is like freaking pulling rotten teeth. It's not all that fun or easy, but I have to or my head will explode. That's kind of a dramatic way of putting it, but really, evn my journal entries tend to be a bit sporadic because I don't have the patience to write all I want to write. In the end, it's my main outlet of expression, even if I don't care for it like I should.

The most difficult for me by far is creative writing. I suppose it's because I've kept a journal about my life since I was seven, but writing fiction is ridiculously challenging for me. I remember once in third grade, we had to write and illustrate our own fictional stories and enter them in a creative writing contest at the school. I spent weeks on that thing I think, storming around, frustrated that I couldn't think of where to send my guppy main character on his epic journey through the sea next. At one point I gave him a best friend who was an angelfish, and who was this big tough fighter guy; mainly I remember this because I was thrilled at thinking of this, creating a tough angelfish! Hahaha, what wit! I think it ended with the guppy and angelfish playing checkers? I don't know.

I read once that the mark of a really intelligent and creative person is if they created and imagined living in a little world of their own and I felt slightly bad for myself. Does it count if it was a half-assed world, cobbled together from books I'd read and TV I'd seen? I was too busy exploring other people's fictional worlds to create my own, I guess. I did, and still do, far more reading than writing.

My mom is teaching a creative writing class this next year, and I'm eyeing her cirriculum warily as I help her gather it together. She's gotten a bunch of writing prompt books off Amazon.com that maybe I could try out sometime, when I gather the courage. I think the key is habit? I know that's how exercise became less daunting for me, knowing that at a certain time in the evening I was going over there, because it was that time. Maybe this school year will be the year I become more comfortable with my compulsion.