just writing

I can't promise that there's anything to read here. I write Free Writing - a method I didn't know was a method until a friend who was an English major informed  me. This was an "All this time I'd been writing prose"  kind of epiphany. I don't plan anything. Much like my painting. I don't plan. Sometimes I try. And then it doesn't work. Sometimes I juxtapose images and words and a person will ask , "what does that have to do with that." My answer typically doesn't satisfy them. The odd thing is is that I've become a better writer over the years. 

One thing that helped me was scoring essays. I had to get a firmer sense of main, coordinating and subordinating clauses - as well as how to use colons, semicolons and commas. For the most part, my writing resists planning - albeit I'm able to write in such a way that my flow of thought has already, as it were, organized the material. Then it's a matter of editing out. Computers help a lot. When I was in college, I had to write every thing out long hand. I didn't know how to type. I found that process daunting and any kind of writing required overcoming a large block. I had such a bad writer's block my sophomore year that I had to take my finals orally. Everyone in my class did. The teacher said that if I'd taken the whole class orally I'd probably have received an A. As it was my oral final saved me in English 102. I got where I couldn't write at all.