Thoughts on my research project

At this point, I have fallen a fair bit behind on my blog posts and I'm trying my best to catch back up.  This blog is supposed to be about what I might be interested in doing for my research project for 5030.
Even with this delayed post, I'm still not quite certain, and yet I have a multitude of ideas.  After my conference with Dr. Chandler and listening back on our interview tape, I think I might like to explore emotional engagement to writing.  This morning I read an article on the emotional engagement to reading, and how it helps readers become more empathetic in their daily lives.  I understand this wholeheartedly--throughout my life, I feel that my internal code of conduct has been pieced together not just through my personal life experience, but also through the things I've read--the things I was emotionally attached to as a reader and heroes/heroines I wanted to aspire to in reality, etc.  Stories like Lang's fairy books, the poems of the Tao te Ching, Tamora Pierce's fiction, Calvin and Hobbes--all and more shaped how I look at the world and how I want to be a part in it.

Osmosis through reading, we've agreed in class, is one of the primary ways we learn writing that does not necessarily connect to academia.  So, I would like to approach this thought from another direction--how do we become emotionally invested in writing?  Is this too created by reading, or other factors?

As an avid writer of fiction stories, I often (admittedly) hurry through my daily routines just to get back to the page, just to tell my story, much like the way I would hurry to Crunchyroll to catch up on my favorite anime or sneak a few pages of the book I'm currently reading between train stops.  It doesn't matter to me if what I'm writing will prove unusable later; what matters is that I need to write it and I get somewhat cranky if I can't manage to get back to it reasonably soon.  It's play that I can call work with a somewhat straight face.  It's familiar and it's sensual and it's stimulating and calming at once.

But what gets me this way?  I found that I've relied on writing since I was little to sustain me when everything else was unsustainable. Currently I'm working on a scene where my protagonist meets his future foster aunt on a lonely rainy road, but she's trapped beneath a fallen limb.  It's challenging, but exciting to find just the right words to make this scene click when it begins and ends so differently.  His nostalgia for the life he's running away from might come from my constant moving around in life, the familiar being taken away, but then the hope of change and the freedom that new surroundings bring.  I'm emotionally invested.

 Is the love of writing born out of some level of suffering, only meant for healing?  I'm not sure I would agree with that.  There's something about the mere act of writing that brings me back--the fresh page or the waiting half-finished sentence, the odd acrid smell of the blue ink, and the cosmetic uniform my otherwise shoddy handwriting takes on once there are a bunch of paragraphs.  There is something material about it as well as emotional, too.

I'll think more on it.