Jane’s Meme: Learning to Write

My friend Jane invited me to her meme about learning to write. The assignment is to write about three contradictory practices that helped in my development. Mine aren’t necessarily contradictory, just not obviously connected, but they overlap quite a bit.
1.
I aced my senior composition project in high school. Grades don’t necessarily reflect what students learn, [...]

Ambiguous, Clear, and Sprawling by Design

I’ve been revising some pieces of writing during the past few weeks in my spare time. By “spare time,” I mean that I’ve been sitting my butt down and limiting distractions as much as possible. As a writer with a day job that doesn’t allow me time to write what I want (i.e., like anybody [...]

Books: Real and Imagined

Today, I traversed the rows of an enormous field of used books, and I reaped hard. A local library held its annual book sale. For $15, you can fit as many books as possible in a medium-sized shopping bag. As the librarian who took my money pointed out, I had a little bit of room [...]

Stuck-uck-uck-uck-uck

Transitions flummox me. I sit there. Metaphorically, physically, emotionally, whateverly, I get stuck for a while.
In an elementary school science class, I learned about inertia. To put it in a less-than-nuanced way, inertia means what’s going keeps going until it’s stopped; what’s stopped remains stopped until something gets it going.
Inertia should not be a problem [...]

Clouded? Turn Away. Come Back.

In response to my own poll about barriers to creative work, I could pin the blame on lack of motivation. But the part of my brain dedicated to quality control would prohibit that decision. It’s picky about such things, wasting my time on a devotion to precision, when I would much rather just say, “yeah, [...]