Writing Does Get Easier

Some blame for my slow start in writing can probably be laid on the public school system as well. I remember being in second grade. At the end of the year old Mrs. Fankhauser encouraged us to keep a journal over the summer to prepare us for third grade. I knew I loved books at the time and wanted to give it a shot. I told my mom about it and she would remind me over the summer to try writing in my journal. I quickly hit a wall. I could write maybe a paragraph at a time. Summer days were lazy then and it felt like everything I could possibly write about was both too big and too small of a topic all at once. After about a week my daily entries became every two days, then every three days, then every week. My final entry barely a month into the summer stated "I hate my journal and don't want to write any more".

While the topic of writing is an important one for school, there are lots of things wrong. To grade fairly, the writing format becomes standardized into the classic five-paragraph essay: introduction, three main points in support, conclusion. These essays suck. Every kid who writes them for school can tell you they suck. They are incredibly boring and nothing in the real world is written like that. Nothing I ever enjoyed reading was written like that.

One thing that gets a lot of students writing is taking notes. I've never taken notes at the same volume as many of my peers. An entire hour of lecture might be three lines of notes from me where others would have a half or even a full page of notebook paper. I've always felt taking notes distracted me from paying attention to the substance of what the teacher was saying and my grades seem to bear that out that my memory was good enough.

High school and college at least introduced a new form of writing, the research paper. These were also boring and not something anyone would want to read, and length minimums cause every student to exercise their ingenuity to fill up the page. Students learn to use three words in place of one, the opposite of good writing, all to make unoriginal points summarizing the evidence in many cases directly discussed by the teacher during the semester. It was at this point in time I often felt jealous of the students who could churn out 4-8 pages the night before. I was never capable of doing that. I would open the word processor and simply stare at the blank page for hours. When I finally got started, it was slow going. I would rewrite the same sentence five times, never quite sure where I wanted to go next. The topic seemed too big and I had both so much to say and so little.

Standardized tests often had essay questions where I did alright but generally felt like I under performed my scores on the other sections. My mind works differently than the people who wrote the essay questions, and often steps of logic that seemed perfectly sensible to me would be unfathomable leaps to others.

My last major attempt to start writing was a blog I wrote in for a few months between my first and second job in 2019. It was better than school because at least I was able to write about some things that truly interested me, but I struggled in many of the same ways as before, rewriting the same stuff over and over while never being happy with it. It felt like a struggle to post every week, let alone every day.

I also spent some amount of effort writing anonymous green stories on mlp, but I'm far too embarrassed to dig that up again even if the pastebins I made are still alive.