On Writing*

Oh, everyone just has to have a blog, don't they? I felt like a rebel when I deleted my facebook account, but really, I'm still a follower at heart. I don't miss facebook, but I do miss having some sort of outlet for writing. When I was in school, it was, well, school, and when I was working a job where I communicated through email almost all day, every day, it was....writing emails, all day, every day. Now that I'm jobless but thankfully not homeless I have fewer opportunities to write, or, at least, less inclination. You'd think it would be the opposite, but the truth is that the less you have to do the less you seem to get done, at least in my world.

Stephen King supposedly sets himself a writing quota for each day and sits there until he fills it, whether it's usable or not. Not that I'm at all comparing myself to him, and some English professors I have known would shudder at the thought. But I revere King as a writer as much as I revere my college adviser, the smartest and hardest working woman I've known to date. She shares King's philosophy that, "the road to hell is paved with adverbs," and I've been trying to stop paving my path ever since. See, I love adverbs, or at least have a tendency to use them excessively (exactly). Sometimes I even catch myself using two in a row and I have to stop and ask myself, "What would Dr. B. think?" I usually (!) come to the conclusion that she would call it lazy writing, and that she would be right.

In any case, I have gotten lazy about writing and communication in general, and I feel like my brain has slowly turned to mush since college. I sometimes look back and read some of the papers I wrote and can't fathom how those thoughts and words ever came out of my head and onto the page. Not that they were anything spectacular; I would call myself an average writer, capable at best, but still it's much more highbrow than anything I could probably write today.

Anyway (another crutch word that I've got to purge), my reasoning behind starting a blog, then, is part communicative outlet and part attempt to keep on writing, no matter how mundane and trite the output may be. I've destroyed every journal I've ever written (except one which I've publicly mocked and used for entertainment among friends) and I'm vowing now to leave this one out in the atmosphere, and hopefully I'll follow through on that promise and not let my ego and insecurity cause me to frantically delete it all one day. And finally, hopefully, prayerfully, it will help me train myself to rid my writing of all these utterly useless adverbs.

*An homage to The King, not plagiarism.