About Writing

With all of my training and practice writing, one would think I would just be able to sit down and plunk out something brilliant. One would think.

My biggest block to writing anything is that I am an editor by nature, so no matter what I write I can always find ways to make it better -- ways to change it -- new ways to approach it. I start to write something, then think, "Hm. This works better as satire." Then, by the time I rewrite it, I'm bored with the subject. If I'm writing something funny, by the time I rework it fifteen times, I don't find it funny anymore.

Pling! "Would you like to save the changes to this document?" The writers of software have also included a mocking cackle discernible only to the tortured writer. It's more audible when you get the blue screen of death, but you don't hear it because you're too busy screaming, "NOOOOOOOO!" at the top of your lungs.

I like ripping apart other people's writing. It's so much safer and I can do it so efficiently. I think that's why my emphasis during my master's work was Literary Criticism. Let me analyze something into smithereens.

So as I contemplate what to write on this blog-o-mine, I am tormented by too many years of education and too many years of editing AP English essays, term papers, and other rot (aka: creative writing). So many considerations: audience, topics, limitations, ethics. You'll notice that's not a complete sentence. Leave it or change it, leave it or change it? Oh no, I've lapsed into stream of consciousness. Erase it or edit it, erase it or edit it? If I make the whole thought a new paragraph, can I get away with it?

And then there is the whole temptation to be a "great writer." You've read this stuff, I'm sure. The ones who are obscure in an attempt to sound intellectual. The ones who use multisyllabic words strung together in semantically questionable ways producing the illusion of having grasped the depths of the ponderable. I marvel at how some writers are labeled "brilliant" instead of "CLEARLY CONFUSED." No, the poet is not deep and does not deserve to be studied (or published), he needs to quit drinking and smoking pot.

So, my first post is merely a rant against the very act of what I'm doing. If you find it brilliant, you're wrong. I simply need more sleep. If you say I'm a deconstructionalist, you've been in school too long.