Hardly a day goes by when I’m not made aware of my limitations as a writer. I enjoy writing about as much as anything in this world. I do a lot of it, not only on this rather prolific blog, but also the occasional story that pops into my head. But no matter what it is that I’m writing, I bump up against my shortcomings.
In terms of this blog, it’s my poor punctuation and grammar skills. What punctuation and grammar problems, you ask? Well, the reason you don’t notice that many is because my wife corrects all of them for me. It usually goes like this...
Pam: On this morning’s blog...don’t use a comma here, a semi colon works better. And, this particular phrase sounds clunky. Oh...and this participle is dangling.
Me: (after corrections are made)...How’s this?
Pam: Better.
The problem goes back to high school and my abysmal academic record. Whenever it was time for my English teacher to cover grammar, I would zone out. My body might have been in class, but my mind was a million miles away, God knows where. The only subjects that could hold my attention in school were history and literature. Everything else was a blur. Pam thinks that grammar was particularly difficult for me because at my core I rebelled against the very concept... I hate rules and having to follow them. Whatever the reason, I obviously didn’t learn anything.
When it comes to writing stories, my problems are more complicated. An idea for a story will pop into my head out of nowhere. I will sit down and start typing, almost continuously for an hour or two, sentences tumbling out fully formed, organizing themselves into paragraphs right before my eyes. This will go on for days and takes very little effort or organization on my part. It just happens. Before I know it, there are 10,000 words and five or six chapters in the document, a precise, discernible and consistent plot containing a half dozen characters. Then, I think..where did that come from?? But then, suddenly, everything stops. Whatever river of imagination that produced this universe of characters and plots dries up, and they sit there flat on the page, waiting for me to tell them what to do. It’s like the literary version of suspended animation. Days go by, then weeks...nothing. Sometimes I will re-read the thing from the beginning hoping to find the spark. Nothing. Then, I’ll be in the middle of cutting the grass or a set of sit-ups at the gym when the flash of an idea will come...and it all starts up again. This ridiculous writing style has produced one complete novel, two half baked ones and a trove of short stories along with a couple dozen aborted attempts. It is also the reason I don’t write for a living.
So, I’ll publish this blog and wait for Pam to alert me to some grammatical infraction or another, and thank my lucky stars for spell check.
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