Off the Cuff

When I was in high school, I took all the English courses I could.  In the literature classes, we read everything from The Grapes of Wrath and For Whom the Bell Tolls, to Emily Dickenson and e.e. cummings, and on to Faustus and Romeo and Juliet (the plays were read aloud in class).

I enjoyed the courses where we read the classics, for the most part.  To be honest, though, I usually only read what was necessary for the upcoming test and mostly skimmed, at that.  I’ve come back to some of them in the last few years to actually read what I missed by skimming (and I STILL don’t care for A Catcher in the Rye), but I haven’t gone back to read any of the poetry . . . it’s just not my thing, I guess.

But the English class I enjoyed the most was creative writing.  No surprise there, since I’m an aspiring mystery author, but it was also the first place I’d ever learned to write in a journal.  Each day, we had to write in our journals for the first five minutes of class.  Sometimes there were suggestions written on the chalkboard, and other times it was just more of a free-flowing train of thought.  I never realized it before, but I now believe Mr. Kutney had us do that so that we could clear our minds of everything that had come before his class, in order to free up the space for our creativity to run around in, and to get those creative juices flowing for whatever the day’s assignment was.

I know we wrote some poetry, and there was an assignment for writing a short story (which I still have in my file cabinet, to maybe be taken out at a later day and improved upon), but there was one assignment I remember more than all the others.

After we’d done our five minutes of journal writing one day, Mr. Kutney told us that he wanted us to write three pages of whatever thought popped into our heads.  Didn’t matter if it was a story, poem, or just more journal-type musings.  All that mattered was that he wanted three pages of it.

I couldn’t think of anything, which was rare for me.  I don’t know if it was some form of stage fright or performance anxiety, but I sat at my desk, staring at my blank pages for several minutes after we were supposed to have begun the assignment.  Eventually, I wrote down the only words floating around my brain: “I can’t think of anything to write today.”

I looked at that sentence for a couple more minutes, then a little voice in my head said Mr. Kutney SAID you could write about anything . . .  So I did.  I wrote about the fact that I had absolutely nothing rolling around in my head at that moment.  I wrote about the anxiety I felt at having nothing, and how I was likening that to writer’s block.  I wrote about my fear that I was going to get a horrible grade on the paper, since I was basically bullshitting my way through the three pages (I don’t think I used the term “bullshitting,” but that was definitely the gist).  As I got near the end of the essay, I wrote about how shocked and happy I was that it all flowed out of me so quickly and easily.

I remembered that particular essay from my high school creative writing course today because I’m sitting here, five hours before this week’s blog is set to be published, and I had nothing prepared; not even an idea in my head.  The week had been hectic, and I hadn’t had a chance before Thursday night at 7:00 pm to work on it.  At one time I had a string of blogs mostly finished and ready to publish, and each Friday, I would sit down and work on one of the next ones; editing it, perfecting it, or maybe even coming up with an idea for another future one.  However, the cache I once had has dwindled down to only one.  I even had that one all scheduled for tomorrow, but hadn’t had any time in this busy week to work on it.  It was nowhere near ready to be read by you all, so I had to crunch my way through something completely off the cuff.

So you’ll hopefully understand and forgive me for whatever horrible grammar mistakes I’ve made in this week’s blog.  I will have definitely looked it over at least twice more before Friday morning, but there’s no guarantee I’ll catch everything.  However, I have successfully bullshitted my way through another “writing assignment,” once again.  I’m not necessarily proud of that–and believe me, I will be working hard to build up another cache of blogs so I’m not so stressed out at the ninth hour–but I AM happy that I was able to meet my desired word count on it.

Oh, and by the way, I received an “A” for that paper about nothing back in high school.  THAT I was proud of.  😉