Rediscovering Writing

I was one of those kids who loved to write. Growing up, I wrote letter, poems, short stories, lists, you name it. I loved the feeling of filling up a page with my thoughts and ideas. I majored in English and Journalism in college, so I carried on that love of writing into my university life. I wrote many long papers for my English courses, but found that my two majors conflicted when it came to writing style. My English professors couldn't understand why my sentences and papers tended to be short and somewhat choppy. My Journalism professors couldn't understand why I enjoyed long, run-on sentences full of flowery descriptions. So I had to explain to each one about my other major. "Ah, that explains it," was the most common response. I had to work very hard to let my English major side come out in the appropriate papers, and to stick to just the facts for my Journalism reports.

After college, I got a job as a producer at TV station, where I was able to continue writing. After 10 years of writing dumbed down versions of news reports (the reasoning for this is Americans have short attention spans, so you have to cram as many facts as you can into 15-20 second blurbs. You get more time if you use a soundbite (45 seconds), or a whole 1:00-1:20 if you're writing a package. So my writing suffered miserably as a result. Oh, in TV terms I was pretty good. And I could write stories fast, too. But now that I'm out of the world of short, punchy TV writing, I realize how much my writing needs to be improved. I'm reading a book right now that I think is really well written, an example of the kind of writing I would like to do. It's called "Love Walked In" by Marisa de los Santos. It's a book club book and I usually make it a policy not to discuss books before the actual meeting, so I'll avoid plot lines. But I'm telling you, the descriptions in this book are just spectacular.

So I'm going to work on being more descriptive in my blog posts and in my other writing. I'm warning all you readers now, so don't be surprised if some of my posts seem a little over the top.
My writing is a work in progress and I just want it to get better! Wish me luck!