The last 2 days straight I’ve been attempting to pull together a blog post with no luck. Unclear sentences, rambling ideas, ugh! So, I’ve decided to sit on it for the time being and tackle it with fresh eyes later. In the meantime, I’ll expound on something else – writing!
Writing and I have a sorted history! Our love/hate affair goes way back to elementary school. I don’t remember exactly what grade I was in, but we had to do some creative writing consistently for class – say once a week. One week, I wrote a story about a flower, but did it from the perspective of the flower itself. It got rave reviews & I was asked to read it to the class! Yay for me!
Fast forward into high school and Honors English. Here’s where I really remember being forced into the land of essays and things took a turn for the worst. (Just thinking about it gives me the willies!) We read the classics, of course, and were asked to dissect them. I quickly discovered that I am not an essay-writing girl. If I was required to write 3 pages, I could crank out 2-1/2. The teacher would say, “expand on this idea” and I would think, “I already made my point”. Needless to say, both the teachers and I were frustrated. (And I never did understand the point of Henry James’s Daisy Miller!)
And in college, well, I was a Music Performance and Interior Design double major – can you say, “no papers”? Years later, I took a job as the press person for our local art center and discovered that while essays may always be my nemesis, my skills work fairly well for the real world. Luckily, I have no plans to take another Honors English class. So, I think I’m home free!
In this age of social media and computers, every artist and business owner is asked to write. Facebook posts, tweets, Instagram captions, verbiage for your website, stories for your blog – we do it all the time! And my hope is to communicate clearly and effectively – whether it is about a flower’s average day, the symbolism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, or an April blog post to you! So, cheers to everyone honing their skills one word at a time!
Do you love writing? Or is the verdict still out?
