Writing

Another gorgeous day. Hubby and I just came in from sitting on the patio. Our apartment building is a U-shaped with a patio in the middle. There are some small benches and a table with four chairs down there. It's a wonderful place to sit outside and read. We enjoyed it for about an hour before my flip-flop adorned feet got chilly!

I finally made myself sit at the computer long enough to write a paper for my current online class. Sometimes it's a little hard to motivate myself when I don't have to. Hopefully the paper won't sound like I waited until 20 hours before the deadline to write it. It just took awhile to sort my thoughts out and make things cohesive. Is anyone buying that?

I love to write......but I've always hated writing papers. I'm not sure why. I envy people who can take a subject and write a 10- or 20-page paper for a class. I can't do that. I know what I know and put it on paper and that's it. Expounding doesn't come easy to me, and I end up with a lot of gibberish “filler words”.

But if you give me a topic and tell me to write a story, I'm your gal. As long as it's a short story. Again – I don't play well with expounding. I've had people comment that I should try to write a novel. I wish I could. But developing a storyline just doesn't seem to live in any part of my brain. I've occasionally heard mystery writers comment that they didn't know who their killer was until the final two or three chapters of the book. But I never quite bought into that – after all, how could they set up the story without knowing who's guilty and where they needed to drop crumbs of clues?

I really enjoyed working on the school newspaper my last couple of years of high school. It was creative. I would have enjoyed working on the student paper in college, but that never worked out. My freshman year I went so far as to talk with the journalism instructor about taking a journalism class (with hopes I could work on the paper). Most of her classes were designed for journalism majors only, including the one I wanted to take. Somehow, I managed to convince her to let me take the class.

Imagine my disappointment when it came time to sign up for the next semester's classes and I discovered that one of my required courses was held at the same time as that journalism class. I had no choice but to go back to the instructor and apologize to her. I don't remember her as being very gracious about it.

I know there's an adage about old dogs and new tricks. But at this point of my life, I'm not really sure that I will figure out this thing of writing good class papers. And it doesn't really matter in the big scheme of things anyway. As long as I can continue to write my blog and entertain myself – and hopefully others – I'm good.