Member-only story
Allow Yourself to Write and See What Happens
When I retired, I wanted to write. I found it more difficult than I thought.
Thirty years of writing business reports had handcuffed my creativity. My writing followed a short template to communicate facts, results, consequences, and recommendations. When I assessed a client’s compliance with a policy, the report highlighted the issues found, their impact, and suggestions to fix them. That simple!
However, when I enrolled in my first creative writing class, my assignments looked like a battlefield when the teacher returned them. She provided lots of feedback in red ink. I took another class and survived more red ink.
I thought I was progressing until I registered for a writers workshop. The teacher assumed the students knew show don’t tell and other creative writing techniques. We read our work in class. The students read very quickly. I had difficulty understanding the stories and catching issues to offer feedback. When I read, the advanced students bulldozed my work.
Besides the embarrassment, I enrolled in another class with the same teacher. I liked to receive feedback but not being able to fix the issues made me hopeless.
This wasn’t the end of my problems. When I experienced the beginning of memory loss, I knew that writing, medications, exercise, and…
