Not A WRITER but........

I'm not a WRITER but I have found that I do like to write. It wasn't always this way. A hundred years ago when I was in school, writing essays and term papers was punishment of the worse kind. Of course back in the old days, you used pen and ink. Editing was difficult to do. If you found that you needed to change around some sentences in a paragraph .....Well it was rewrite the whole thing. The process was inhibiting to free flowing ideas.

Add to that, the dread "red" remarks from the instructor. In school we learn grammar (with a capital G), topic sentences, punctuation and after all of that you still have to worry about spelling and proofreading. In the business world we use bullet points and kept it brief. It choked the life out of finding any joy in writing.

My breakthrough in learning to enjoy writing just for the joy of writing came years later. I started keeping a journal. Three pages in long hand, with a pen, everyday.......Everyday. I'd get up early in the morning and write. As you may be wondering.....what can you possible find to fill up three pages everyday. I had no rules about what I should write, the only rule was "three pages. So somedays it was more like a check list of things I need to do, somedays it was writing about what someone in the family was doing, somedays it was about how I felt about my photography but somedays.......nothing........absolutely nothing came to mind. I'd sit, listening, looking out the window and suddenly the pen would drop to the paper and start to write. It might be about the sounds of the morning or the squirrels fighting at the bird feeder.

It started to feel good to write. I didn't reread, I didn't edit. I didn't worry about sentence structure or topic sentences or paragraphs and certainly not about punctuation. Dots, dashes and underlines were used whenever and wherever they fell. And most mornings my pen didn't stutter, it just moved along the page. I was writing.

Writing yes, but how do WRITERS put together phrases like Belle does in one of her blogs.

I knew that he was Alabama good but was he New York perfect?

Alabama good/New York perfect............I wonder how many morning pages I'll have to write before my pen can make word pictures and turn phrases that just tickle my fancy like this one.