Writing: Old Friend, New Nemesis

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!