Writer's Block

I suffer from writer's block.  I refer not to that malady where weeks pass and not a word gets written; but of one so great that years go by without a single sentence surviving long enough to be read by anyone other than the author.  Why is this?

Reflecting upon my early schooling I treated reading as merely a means of acquiring information about science, particularly astronomy, rather than for entertainment.  I loved science, mathematics, and geography.  English, history, and art failed to excite me at this point in my life.  If I wrote anything prior to entering high school I don't recall any of it which is probably fortunate.

My tenth grade English teacher once asked me what I intended to do with my life and was astounded to learn that my plans did not include a writing career. This may have boosted my ego but I never seriously thought of myself as having anything even close to superior writing abilities. During my senior year at high school the junior and senior classes were required to write a major term paper worth one-third of the last marking period’s grade. When the papers were returned the teacher explained with some fanfare that out of a couple of hundred papers only two were deemed worthy of an A and one of them was in our class. When she announced that it was me I could hear the muted, “him?” that seemed to come from all directions at once. I am not sure but there might have even been a muted, “me?” buried in there somewhere. I still scratch my head over that one. Once in college things changed. My first paper was returned with a C+ and several critical comments. The only one I remember is, “You’re putting me on”. I had never been graded on something so subjective and wasn’t sure how to proceed. I read the paper a few times and discovered one of its major failings. It was as boring as an insurance seminar. As the semester progressed I struggled to satisfy my professor and put additional effort into writing my assignments. I gradually improved my writing and soon saw an A on each and every paper I produced. Once or twice he gave me an A+ along with some very complimentary comments. After that I had little difficulty writing, simply assuming it was good. The following semester I breezed through another English class where my writing skills were complemented by aligned ideology with the professor.  Finding someone in academia committed to free markets feels like finding a parking place in Manhattan. I eventually took a course allowing me to try my hand at science fiction. The course required quite a bit of reading and even though it was sprinkled with some of what I call science fantasy, I enjoyed it. Understanding science and possessing a vivid imagination gave me a distinct advantage when the time came to write essays. While others wrote essays containing ideas even more lame than those found in an old Lost in Space episode I merrily composed short stories that frequently poked fun at others’ ignorance of science. Compared to the rest of the class I must have shined like a beacon of hope to the professor who suffered through long hours of boring and pointless stories by people whose only exposure to science came in the form of TV programs like Star Trek. After college I concentrated on chemistry and physics letting creative writing fall by the wayside. Employed as an industrial chemist, little opportunity presented itself for creative writing though some might dispute that. It is very tempting to employ creative writing to de-emphasize poor or incomplete data. I prefer to maintain intellectual honesty both because it is the right thing to do and because it is often soon discovered. Maybe someday I will write about some of the more blatant intellectual dishonesty I have witnessed. Now more than forty years since my tenth grade English teacher asked me about my career plans I tried to play with creative writing again. I attempted to present chemistry in a new and refreshing manner but found I couldn’t even get the first paragraph completed. My vocabulary had evaporated and everything I wrote looked amateurish. Even now as I read what I have written so far, I have a profound sense of disappointment. I am embarrassed to admit that after comparing technical reports I wrote over a decade ago to recent ones I can detect a significant degradation in quality. Am I getting lazier or more careless as I age or am I observing the ravishes of age on my mind? More importantly, can I reverse the trend? So dear reader I hereby give myself a C+ and hope you do not feel I am putting you on. I’ll try to do better the next time.