Something I NEED to do.

[kjpepper]

I was in the Jones library for a few minutes today, idly wandering through the stacks looking for something new to catch my fancy.

Instead of finding something, I had that curious phenomenon where an entire collective mass of paper, ink, cloth, glue and thread rises up and yells "WHY ARE YOU LOOKING FOR SOMETHING TO READ? YOU SHOULD BE WRITING!!" at me. Very curious, especially given that no one else hears that but me. I know no one else heard it, there would have been dirty looks and emphatic "shhhh!" noises from the other patrons reading around me.

Yeah, this happens sometimes. Though, considering I spend more time in bookstores than libraries, I've had it happen more in the fiction stacks of Bunns and Noodle more often than I'd like.

I need to start writing again. For real.

Comments

[nekosensei.livejournal.com]

Actually, I started working on a story a couple of days ago. It's no where near finished, but it's a start. I must say that it felt really good to be writing again. I only had about an hour to work on it and then I had to leave to teach class. I was kind of annoyed that I had to push myself away from the computer because I was starting to really get into it. I hope to pick it up again once I'm done grading finals and such.

You know...I used to do a lot more writing in high school and college. I was very creative back then, but now, I feel like I'm getting rusty. Writing used to come much more easily to me. Nowadays, I "consume" a lot more than what I produce. I think some of that is just plain laziness. It's a shame really. I used to get a lot of complements about my writing from teachers in high school and college. In grad school, one of my professors photocopied one of the essays I'd written and used it as an example of good writing.

I feel like the quality of my writing has gone downhill in recent years. For one, I felt like, back then, I was much better at picking out the right word. Of course, when I used to write, I kept a copy of a thesaurus with me. I never used word's thesaurus program that much. If I felt unhappy with a word that came to mind and I didn't feel like it flowed well with the rest of the sentence, I would look it up and see if there was a word in the list that expressed what I was trying to say better. Of course, that doesn't mean that I would use it to choose words that sounded high-faluting (not sure how that's spelled) that I had no idea what they meant. (A lot of people do this). Just words that stylistically sounded better. You know what I mean? In other words, I used it more for inspiration then, "hey! Look at this big word I'm using! I sound so smart!"

Anyhow...I think the point of that last paragraph was that I need to invest in another thesaurus. :)