Personal Experience
How I Got Back into Writing After Twenty Years and What To Do if You’re “Stuck”.
It was the first time I had written something of substance in over a decade.
I’ve always known I wanted to be a writer since I was a child.
I was the nerdy kid who would get in trouble in elementary school for writing or reading a book when everyone else was doing other work. In fourth grade, I wrote ten pages front and back about baseball, how it’s played, and the entire history of the sport, just for fun.
Even though I’d end up “in trouble”, my work ended up on the bulletin board outside the classroom.
By the time high school began, however, I’d lost most interest in writing. Having to analyze poems, plays, and stories over and over made me hate them. While I now realize that it’s necessary to understand the basics of writing to be good at it and know what you’re reading, I feel the way it’s taught in schools is confusing and uninteresting.
So I largely quit writing, aside from keeping a journal off and on during my summer of trips around the US, which got lost that same year.
I gave up. For about eight years.
