On Writing, A Posting of No Craft

I have never considered myself a very good writer. Not even a passable one, the kind with an excellent grasp of the mechanics, but a less sure hand on the actual creation of prose. I’m more the sort who, if I’d been alive in the sixties and seventies, would ignore such conventions as quotation marks, apostrophizes, and punctuation marks, not to mention things like narrative flow or cohesion. The kind who today is either unread and forgotten or else mocked because of their indulgent style, that was just a smokescreen for their lack of talent.

            Having said all of that, I feel I would be remiss if I left out that I am a writing major. See, I’d really like to be a good writer, and in my more deluded moments I can even convince myself that I am at most quasi-good; that I’m at least as good as that Michael Bay of novelists James Patterson. But really, I’m kidding myself.

            To begin with, I have a niggling problem with editing. I am terrible at it. For other people’s work, I generally give it a quick once over, correct obvious and minor spelling mistakes, then hand it back with a comment like “Great Job!” or something else equally patronizing and phony. It’s not that I’m trying to be those things, it’s that I feel I’m good enough at alienating others through simply discourse, so why exacerbate the problem? On the more personal level, I can rarely get the required distance from my work, so I invariably miss glaring grammatical faults (as anyone who reads this will become acutely aware).

            My particular bad habit is an addiction to the comma. I use them freely, in an abundance that makes most people feel vaguely sick. It’s like a one of those psychological exams; find all the comma errors in this paragraph, in less than thirty seconds (I think there are two, at least).  My other major problem is hominines. If I had a time for every time I confused there, their, and they’re, I would be able to buy the best two-thirds of Manhattan, include the more iconic bridges. Really, I’m surprised the grammar police haven’t declared me public enemy number one. Although, there’s that grandiosity creeping in again, that inflated sense of self, that grand delusion that got me here in the first place.