Me, A Writer?
Beware the wolves in sheep’s clothing
I was quite surprised and flattered the day I realized that I had been added as a contributor to The Writing Experiment. My initial feel-good thoughts were, oh my, my work is getting some traction, people are willing to spend the minute or two reading my prose and my poems, agreeing but many times disagreeing with what I had to say. A smattering of claps here and there — I was doing a George Jefferson and Movin’ On Up. But it was not long before other thoughts crept into my head, the ones with the seven heads and twenty-four eyes, always looking for ways to criticize my accomplishments no matter how small. “Maybe it's more like you have been caught. It is now known that your writing is nothing more than an experiment. Faker! Maybe your flaws are being exposed.”
Those thoughts grew much louder than the more pleasant ones I had been experiencing earlier — so loud that I went out to my garden to quiet them and to think.
The ground was covered in leaves again. I stupz. It was just last evening I had had them raked and tossed for mulch, and these trees that I love so much had decided to drop their wares for me to remove again. New thoughts entered my mind, “there you go again, looking at the glass half full as if the dark has not the opposing force of light, and bad writing, good. Yes, the leaves fell, but what else fell from the trees while you were asleep? I looked around. More than a dozen ripe mangoes were lying on the ground, enough for me to have and share. I smiled, gathered them up, and placed them on a nearby table. A leaf from a small soursop plant beckoned me. It wanted to be plucked, so I did so, adding it to my cup of piping hot herbal brew — cancer fighter, they say, the soursop plant, fruits, leaves, and seed.
The thought of what to write for this new publication came back to me. What tidbit of knowledge can I add to this experiment? I began to write, not knowing where it might lead, but the words came so quickly and so clearly, and my fingers flew across the keyboard; I realized that many of us take for granted the fact that English is our mother tongue — the language of business and commerce, the language that most people want to learn so that they can communicate fully and freely. I read many stories and see the effort and struggle to find the words and get them just right while trying to use phrases and idiomatic expressions correctly. Grammarly helps to some extent, but it does not get many of the writer's nuances — the what-it-is-they-really-want-to-sayness of their story.
So perhaps this writing experiment is for all of us to explore, to be brave enough to write even when we are unsure of our words, even with limited vocabulary and the grammar that Grammarly misses.
We admire and applaud these folks. We thank them for their effort and their ideas and give them fifty claps!
Thank you to the editor of The Writing Experiment, Gaby Rogut, for adding me as a contributor.
