Overthinker vs Freethinker

During my time in the course, I was able to take note of various ways that my writing may have lacked prior to the course. The main method that aided in my growth has been the various activities that I participated in while in class which all were very engaging, thus making it hard not to grow. The main growth that I noticed in my writing was my ability to write freely and be able to just put what comes to mind on paper. The idea of “freethinking” is interesting, because when we write as authors we always have a purpose and an agenda to be fulfilled. The line that makes this idea hard to accomplish is whether or not one is overthinking vs freethinking, as freethinking though it’s what comes to your mind on paper, an author would still provide literary elements that define a text such as figurative language. This growth in writing is demonstrated through my freewriting as when one looks at the way I write, it’s evident that now my writing has a subtle voice or “soul” to it. 

In class, when freewriting at first I tended to overthink what I was doing, attempting free thinking but in reality it was really just thinking too hard while writing these over calculated rants on paper. Figure 1 demonstrates my first freewrite where I evidently just said whatever came to mind which was me just questioning what I am writing and my purpose.

This is a flawed attempt at free thinking because I wasn’t creating anything from the mind that appeared as authored work, there was no plot, characters, descriptions, or anything in between it’s just a purposeless rant leading nowhere. This appears to be the first step in becoming a free thinker, which is to simply have thoughts and put it on paper but as I progressed through the class and as a writer I was able to take these thoughts and make a more appealing literature. This idea is more apparent for my next step in developing my freethinking, as shown in Figure 2, I was ranting about what came to mind again but this time I managed to form these thoughts into a entire story.

Now I was able to develop the ability to freely take whatever came to mind and turn it into a narration. At this point in my development, I was solely creating freewriting similar to this as I was really enjoying being able to take my thoughts and feelings and turn them into either anecdotal stories or fictional stories. Lastly, figures 3 and 4 are examples of the final developmental stage in my freethinking because I was finally able to adapt everything that I construct mentally and put it towards a text utilizing multiple forms of literary methods ranging from imagery to metaphors to argumentative. In figure 3, I was able to create a fantasy story using how I felt about that day about how dirty my dormitory kitchen was. I used metaphors of creatures representing the abstract idea of uncleanliness and really goes deep into how a dirty environment (in the story a village) can mentally damage a person. I was able to implement story-telling along with figurative language in a free-write when all I was trying to do was just talk about what I was thinking during that time. Figure 4 also accurately displays true freethinking as in the text I was able to turn my thoughts about hammerhead sharks during that morning into a whole descriptive narration with a theme being identified at the end. I was able to use intensive descriptive language in order to create an image in my reader’s head as well as adding subliminal messaging about being free-spirited and only worrying about yourself in the text. Being a proper freethinker was able to stimulate my ability to take ideas formed in my head and turn them into a variety of different types of texts. 

Free thinking is a delicate process and it is the highlight of my growth as a writer. Now when I have to write for an assignment, especially drafts, I tend to simply just think about the general idea I have to write about and using my writing skills I am able to write full texts based on ideas I may have thought about in seconds. As shown with figure 4, all I was thinking about was hammerhead sharks, thus I wrote about hammerhead sharks but because I implemented plenty of literary devices I was able to write a long purposeful text. The goal for authors should be to deviate from overthinking their writing pieces and to simply just think freely about what they want to convey to a reader. Using one’s creative mind and the laws of writing we can illustrate a world of beautiful ideas just by thinking freely. This was my favorite aspect of writing, especially narrative story-telling, as I was able to achieve a higher level of emotional intelligence and writing skill.