My Writing Pitfall

Writing is, without a doubt, a very skilled craft that requires many thousands of hours of practice. One must hone their ability to write over years of doing it non-stop, nurturing their ability to form sentences from jumbles of words. It takes concentration to collect your thoughts, organize them and chew it over, spit it out and organize it again, repeat ad nauseum until your brain hurts, and then because you have to be a little bit crazy to be a writer you push a tiny bit further.

Here's my problem. Collecting thoughts before writing. I don't know what it is, but sometimes I just like to sit down and let my thoughts formulate in front of me. It's a bad practice for anyone who has serious intentions of being a writer. It really is something I need to learn to overcome.

Stream of consciousness, that's what they call it, does have a place in the literary world. The works from many of the writers and poets during the Beat generation could easily fall in this category. It's like a ride through a thought process, small connections being made in real time, only to be fleshed out in the written word. I'm no Kerouac, I'm no Ginsberg, but I still find myself stuck writing with no direction.

I could easily place blame on teachers, or even the lack thereof considering I was only able to afford a single semester of college, but I'm not going to. The only person I can blame for my half rambles is myself. The inner workings of my mind are a hard thing to deal with, but I know with sheer willpower I could manage to sort myself out. For the next few weeks, I want to focus on a specific thought or experience I have had, really find the words with what I want to say and begin trying to hone myself into becoming a better writer.

I will start with offering up my first topic. Sound. The attention I somehow manage to provide to the way things sound. The focus that I am able to place on them. And maybe, someway that I can correlate that same focus to writing as well.