As a CreComm student who is familiar, and had been familiar prior
to this point, with multitasking, I’m finding that my brain, so close to
Christmas break, is having a difficult time doing so, particularly when it come
to writing.
I’ll say right now that the sentence you just read, unless of
course you read things from the second paragraph onwards, is offending every
Journalistic cell in my body. (I can tell you that there aren’t many of them.)
It’s maybe a little convoluted, I think there’s six commas, and I
can feel my J-instructor just cringing. But what you just read is how I hear
stuff in my brain. If you shrunk down and walked around inside my head these
are the words you’d see, in that order, lined up and ready to give my fingers
their marching orders.
Or it used to be.
Today, sitting here (multitasking: eating my lunch, writing a
blog, as well as) editing my creative writing fiction I find the sentences
forming in my head are straight, to the point, with no words like convoluted. Perfect for
Journalism.
The problem is I used to think of myself as a good writer, it was
the thing I loved to do. But reading over some of my stuff for Journalism,
articles, reviews, etcetera, it’s good writing, but not something I’m
particularly proud of. The thing is it doesn’t sound all the way like me,
probably because my sentences have very few commas or semi-colons (God, I love
a good semi-colon) and adverbs have been ripped right out of my vocabulary.
Trying to write my first, second, and now third revision of my
piece of fiction it’s coming out of my brain all wrong. I haven’t had writer’s
block this bad since…I wrote a review assignment this weekend. I’ll be honest,
the problem is not lack of what to write, it’s insecurity about how to write it
and, being honest again, I’m a stubborn person. The way I want to tell you a
story is that was I think this story should be told—with interjections, set off
by commas, dashes, and lots of brackets. (Did I just say that?)
I’m suffering…yes, suffering… from writing schizophrenia. And it
sucks.
The way I see it, only option available to me, given that I’m too something (I can’t think of the word and I
hate it when that happens) to compartmentalize my writing style properly, is to
get through the next two weeks and then sleep it off for two more. Maybe, just
possibly, my convoluted sentences that I love so much and that I’ve worked so
hard to take out of my writing will come back to me in their proper place: a
separate Word document with the title “Creative…blah blah blah” on it.
ps. One of the reasons I’ve come up with for the panic that now
accompanies sitting down with my laptop, besides the need to pare down my
writing by 50 or 60 words for J, is word count. If this side note sounds
a little awkward, it’s because I’m trying to stretch it out to 500 words to fit
some criteria. 528. Wait, 530. That number would be heading in the opposite
direction if this were a Journalism assignment.
