I have always hated to write. Something happened in my early childhood that to this day gives me a mental block to accurate spelling and proper grammar. No mater how hard I try to learn correct spelling I still spell the people who live next door “nabor”!

I have always felt insecure about this. I don’t really take notes because I am concerned someone will look over at my pad and see how bad my spelling is. This actually has benefited me in some ways because I have learned to memorize just about everything. I still wish I could be a better note taker and I really do work at it.

In my career as a tv guy and marketing/donor development guy the need to write copy keeps increasing. I prefer to collaborate with a writer and/or a team. Writing copy by myself has always been very stressful.

I read a lot about writing good copy although the experts tell me to throw away the books and just do it. The more you write (or do anything) you will get better at it. In the past some people who I greatly respect say I have writing talent but I still have to wrestle with it.

This year, through some circumstances outside of my control, I was forced to write more and more. So instead of trying to fight it I am working hard to actually write more. This blog has helped although I mostly just type off the top of my head. I still don’t like to write but last night, I found some really bad copy on the internet and took a second to rewrite it. I actually had fun doing it.

While I was writing this I remembered something I wrote in college that relates not only to this topic but the Christmas season. The professor gave each one of us a single Hershey Kiss and asked us to write about some Christmas memory that involved a Hershey Kiss. I honestly tried but I did not have any such memories so I wrote about the frustration this assignment gave me. I thought it was very creative. I received an F. 

“The Kiss of Death”

      I have now been sitting here in my office for hours yet it seems like days, maybe even weeks. My head is stooped over my desk as my body is arched out of this large brown swivel chair. My distressed brain is uncomfortably resting in my clammy hands. My elbows are turning a bruised red; a red that runs straight up my arms to my consumed bugged-out-eyes.  My chin is now only a few inches from taking my entire skull on a crash landing into a cheap desk calendar given to me at Christmas by a cleaning supply company. The central processing unit between my ears is on neural overload while thoughts race around like bees in dimension of a honeycomb.  Yet not one thought about the Hershey’s Kiss that sits directly in front of my helpless face has been birthed.

      What a great gift it would be to sit down, look at a piece of chocolate, grab a pen, scribble down a few words on a scrap of paper that deliver a visualization to a reader. I can only pray that God will bless me with the astonishing talent for words that He has given to so many writers. Time after time I marvel at how words, thoughts, ideas and visions just seem to flow off the page and into my mind. How do they, the writers, come up with these supernatural works of art?

      I have two visions of a professional writer yet I will never view myself as even an amateur reader. The one writer I see sits at a desk with an old style typewriter in a poorly lit office. A desk lamp glows as shadows of crumpled up paper fill the scene. I see him typing madly and then in a moment of frustration ripping the paper from the machine and adding it to an already overflowing waste basket.

      The other I see in a nice pastel colored office with sunlight shining through flowered curtains. The writer sits at a desk facing a modern looking computer while a hot cup of coffee steams up the foreground. You hear that constant taping of the keyboard as you see a blissful smile on their face.

      These revelations of the writer that dwell in my subconscious are just disclosures of myself and not real visions of a true writer. Yes they are visions that may have been planted by another writer’s screenplay or novel however, one shows the frustration I feel looking at this “kiss of death” while the other represents the talent I wish I had.