Writing is a habit. The more you do it, the easier it is to do. I find that if I don’t blog for a few days, I start to run out of ideas to write about. Conversely, if I keep blogging, the ideas keep flowing.

I’ve considered myself a writer since I was about six or seven years old and was “published” in the school paper. I wrote an essay on our trip to a bread factory. I also had a poem published. I wrote poetry throughout my childhood and poetry became my personal emotional outlet for most of my life. I stopped writing about ten years ago when I decided to mostly be happy. (Real happy not the pretend happy of my twenties.) I find it difficult to write poetry unless I’m desperately sad and lonely or heartbroken.

I’ll trade happiness for heartbreak and poetry any day!

Even when I was a child, my poetry had a tinge of sadness. Consider this, written when I was around 11 years old and vacationing with my family at the Caspian Sea:

The wind blows
The sea roars
My feet are cold
on the naked floors

The sky hath grown dark
unto the sea
as the wind whispers
and wails at me

The sun has gone down
The moon has come up
My feelings are all mixed
and jumbled in a cup.

Yes, I wrote “hath.” I had just finished reading a biography of the Bronte sisters and was in a hath kind of mood. It really was storming, the floors really were bare and I had pink eye and sand in my butt from earlier in the day. All I remember of the trip was writing the poem. Which makes sense when you consider how much focus and effort it takes to concentrate one’s thoughts and express them in rhyme.

In college, a number of professors commented on my papers that I had an “easy, breezy writing style” and similar sentiments. That little bit of unsolicited praise was all it took for me to decide to become a writer. After graduation, I landed a job at an ad agency and within months became their copywriter.

I continued with jobs that required a great deal of writing until my mid-30′s. I found that writing for a living took the pleasure and joy out of writing for me. It became something I had to do instead of something I wanted/needed to do. I was a pretty good copywriter, which is to say I can write short, pithy bits. I tried to write a novel – indeed, I still have several ideas for one – but I’m just not that kind of writer. I remember being VERY excited when I first read “Tales of the City.” The whole book is mostly dialogue and short, short chapters. I thought, “Hmmm, maybe I CAN write a novel if I do it like that.” Of course, I’m not funny enough and so that dream died.

As I advanced in my career, I did less writing for work and seemed to give up writing for pleasure altogether. Until now. Blogging has become my modern-day journal, diary, place to express myself and have some fun. But there are days, like today, when I can’t think of a thing to write about. So I wrote about writing.

Yep, I hath done it.