One of the first roadblocks I faced getting this website launched was what my first post would be like.I dreamed it was this great story about how I was challenged, and then at the end succeeded in whatever I was challenged about. I have no issue setting up a website to store my thoughts and ideas but once it comes down to actually writing something, bam writer’s block hits, the same writer’s block that I have had since my college days. I find it sad that I create this website for writing then once the site is up and running, I think of anything to write about.My mind will play tricks on me, and give me all these numerous tasks and try to convince me that doing these tasks are far more important than writing up a blog post.I am going to come right out and say it, I blame my freshman english teacher as the blocker of my creativity. He is the cause of me not wanting to do any creative writing.I enjoyed writing until I became a freshman in college and had to take an English Composition class. Now for some I have to remind you that this was before computers and autocorrect spelling and grammar.The teacher was this old curmudgeon who carried his class materials in this old US Army World War 2 amunition box.
He used it as a portable file cabinet with our graded paper, index cards, etc. As I remember, he wasn’t the friendliest professor, a drastic change of pace from the usual young, fresh-out-of-college woman teacher who encourage you to put your wildest ideas down on paper, regardless of how dumb the idea was.Now that I have become an old curmudgeon too, I must remind the younger readers that this was before computers, smartphones, etc. You only had a typewriter or pen paper and a dictionary. You know you are old when you must remind somebody that such a situation was before they invented today’s items.The budding writer in me got killed and buried in that composition class. I consistently got D’s on my papers for poor grammar structure, misuse of passive voice, and misspelled words, and I got dinged for it. I was hurt because, in high school, most of the young, fresh-out-of-college women English teachers would see through the grammar errors and value the story. I can trace my poor grammar or inability to understand English grammar rules back to the fourth grade. I knew I was good at following structure back then. If I could go back in time with today’s laptop and word-processing software, things may have turned out differently.I should have just worked up enough guts to ask for help, find some upper class girl who was majoring in english for help but I didn’t just take the D grade and walk away. To be fair there really wasn’t a student center where you could go and find such a girl. Of course this teacher had no desire to spend time with me to work on my grammar. In the end I got a D and had to take the class over in community college during the summer break. I don’t know how college grading systems work now, but back then you got zero credit for the class. Getting a D just stood for dumb. I clearly remember one of the assignments was to write an allegory. In my last desperate attempt to get a better grade, I came up with what I considered my best work. The story involved a dog, a cat, and an old man. The old man fed the cat and the dog until the day he died. Nobody knew the old had passed, so he lay there decomposing while hunger set in with the dog and the cat. A battle occurred between the dog, loyal to the owner, and the cat, who didn’t care about the old, only that he got fed.
I will write up the complete story in a later blog, but the end was the cat started to eat the dead old man to survive and the dog attacked the cat, killed it, and ate the cat to survive. The professor returned my paper covered in red with a D minus and a guarantee I wouldn’t be passing this class.I was so brokenhearted, but a week later, he asked for the paperback, and I, Mr. Optimistic, thought he would change the grade. Three days later, the paper was handed back with the grade unchanged. To this day, I suspect he stole my story or, at the very least, the idea of it. The sad thing was my enthusiasm for writing short stories or for that matter, any writing at all died with that D minus. Now, here I am, 65 years old, with a bit of life still left in me, and I will try to write stories again. I am trying to wake up that creative mind that I put in a coffin years ago. If I have enough of them, I will post them on this blog and maybe a Kindle book. I will wrap this up by saying that English has been bastardized so much that I don’t think there is an English composition class anymore.At the very least, the story has become far more critical than the grammar rules. Screw grammar rules, long live the creative hippie. *Please be advised that spell check and Grammarly software were run on this post to correct spelling and grammar errors of the so-called creative hippie.Peace Out !