I Write!

My friends ask me if I still write, now that I am busy teaching and stuff. I agonize, but I conclude...


I write these days. Sure I do, I write. “Lacks development of key ideas - suggest you organize before writing.” Sometimes I write “your conventions are not up to an appropriate level for this class. I suggest you down track.” Other times I write “refer to the rubric - your meaning is unclear.” Often, it is just “Lacks a controlling idea.”

What is the point? I still write! I may not write myself, but I write. My writing may not be an expression of my own ideas, my own thoughts and dreams dribbling and drabbling onto paper, it may not be fulfillment of my ideas rolling out of my brain with the tick, tick, tick of the computer keys signifying a stream of my consciousness, but, I write. I may lack the joy of ideas rolling out of my brain like the waves of a noreaster piling up on Jones Beach, or a jag of writing about things that make me pause and say, what the hell? But, I still write.

Sometimes writing is just writing. Just expressing yourself, putting words on paper, as it were, is still writing. It doesn’t have to be development of a novel, or another chapter in the memoir; sometimes writing is just about writing. And, sometimes, telling my students to organize first is all the writing I do. And, that is okay.

Sometimes. Sometimes.

But not now. I feel an itch. I will scratch!

Spike