Brendan's+Paper+1+Reflections

Overall, writing this paper was not a bad experience because it was an interesting topic, video games. Writing this paper was kind of fun for me because it made me realize why video games are so popular and addicting in this day in age, even though I am not a gamer. I began writing my paper about a week before it was due. I wrote the entire thing, prewriting, rough draft and final draft in my dorm room, while I was alone, with no background noise, on my computer. This is the scenario where I am the most productive and efficient. Before I started writing my paper, I did some research on why video games are so popular, just to have a little more background information when I was writing this. The only real challenge I faced when writing this paper was writing a paper about why so many people are gamers, when I am not a gamer at all. I overcame this by putting myself in the mindset of a gamer. To do this I thought about times when I had a lot of fun playing video games and did some more research. Once I realized that I had been in short trances from video games before, I was able to put myself in that mindset and work through the paper pretty easily. The biggest piece of advice that I think students should know in writing a narrative piece of writing is to put yourself in the place or mindset of what the paper is asking you to write about. You can do this by thinking of people who are like what the paper is asking about or research the topic to get a feel for the assignment. I believe that the most trouble in writing a paper comes from starting the paper. My advice about how to get started on a paper like this is to brainstorm ideas by writing down phrases in another document to get your creative writing juices flowing. These phrases will eventually trigger how you can get this paper going, and we all know once we get going on a paper, the paper becomes a lot easier.