I miss the damn place again

I wanted to respond to my spectacular weekend. I attended Cornell's Orientation Weekend to see old friends and stuff. I wanted to write about it but I couldn't so instead I wrote a letter to a pair of professors of mine. I'll post the response sometime.

Hello,
This is Ryan Gomez, a student from a class of yours a while back. I've recently graduated and wanted to report that I'm doing well as a graduate of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering looking for a career in Mapping, Cartography and Data Visualization.

I also want to be a better writer. I'm inspired this late evening to write to you because you were a writing teacher of mine. College happened to me in a big way, in the most typical of ways. I expanded my mind, I took a lot of classes, met a lot of cool people and went to a lot of parties. I learned about how the process of forming words happens in a specific place in the brain. I've read beautiful stories of wit and struggle. I learned the world is much bigger than me and that I want to react, participate and create.

Do you have any advice?

I just came back from Orientation Week to see my old friends, now in whatever place I was in for my Sophomore, Junior and Senior year. I wanted to react on a blog I'm writing to help me communicate but I'm stuck. I can only imagine what a professional writer must discuss through the analysis and creation of literature. When I try to write, all those things flood to me. Where do I begin? Point of View? Rhetoric? Plot? It's as if in my search for a formula, that word-forming part of my brain shuts off. When I do start to write, I want it to be perfect, and such the cycle of perfectionism and procrastination repeats.

So allow me to ask:

• Why is it that your write over why I make maps or others say, go into business or medicine?
• When do you get inspired to write and how do you follow a piece of writing to the end?
• In what proportion do you write prose, poetry, analysis, stories, non-fiction? - professionally and personally.
• Is it really like elementary school? - the Writing Process - and what are your thoughts on the process of composing?
• What familiar patterns do you use in your compositions?

Respond at your leisure. Any thoughts would be appreciated..

Thanks for being a Teacher,
Ryan Gomez '09