Do you have hobbies that over the years you have slowly let
atrophy away to where they are non-existent?
I'll bet most of us experience this. One such hobby for me is writing.
To me, writing is like an old friend I have grown apart from. In fact, it has
become a nemesis. This is a story of my history of writing, why I feel writing
is not my friend anymore, and how I plan to rekindle the friendship.
When I was young, I loved writing. I didn’t enjoy required
writing like school reports, etc... I enjoyed creative writing. In seventh
grade, I won a competition for my true story of riding a pig backward. I'll
never forget the ride or the look on my grandfather's face. Priceless!
I then began writing simple songs and parodies. Weird Al was
an inspiration. The first song I wrote parodied a song by Prince. I performed the song in school, and learned
that lyrics can be very hurtful. Do not
make fun of your friends, especially if they have no sense of humor!
My next parody was for a 4H talent competition. My cousin,
Matt Miller and I performed the song "4H", parodying the Beatles tune
"Do You Want to Know a Secret". It seems we won an award, but I am
not sure what. I do remember that after our performance we were asked to try
out for the State of Indiana 4H Chorus. We were selected!!
Once I began college, my writing focused on song lyrics. Two of my roommates and I started a band along
with two other freshmen. We were mostly a
covers band, but I wrote several original songs. We recorded two of them as demos in the
college radio station studio. Only one
song was ever performed. “You Make It
All Right.” The lyrics for that song
came to me in a dream. I may write more
about that song in a later post.
In the many years since my college days, I’ve occasionally
written song lyrics, but no many in the last 10+ years. Recently going through storage,
I found some old lyric notebooks and read through some of them. Some were quite terrible, but some have some
potential. I decided to commit myself to
writing again.
So why the nemesis angle.
I now write mostly for business communication. Most of this writing is focused on
communicating information as clearly and simply as possible. Creativity does not typically come into play.
My typical email contains less than 100 words, and my typical presentation is
probably the similar with most information conveyed graphically. This post will
be 600+ words before I am done. Creative writing is my nemesis because I
recognize the atrophy in my ability to write creatively. Can I still write where others might find it interesting?
To challenge myself to write again and exercise those skills,
I decided to begin writing two blogs. This
blog, Duane Long’s Blog, will focus on general interest topics. It may include attempts at poetry, song
lyrics, etc… Anything goes! The second
blog, Lean Sigma for Superior Service will focus on topics related to my
profession. I hope that blog is useful
to others whose work is similar to mine.
Between the two blogs, I plan to post at least 3 times a week. My writing workout.
So here’s to getting started!
