Writing...

The instructions say it cannot be more than three pages. They give 4 prompts… What the hell? How about a page a prompt? Nah that would make too much sense. This is worth money, as in real cash. Nearly $6,000 a year. Not like make- or-break money but, damn- I’d-like-to-have-it money. It has been ten years since I passed these board exams. When I first did it, I needed that money. Now, not so much. But who wants to give money back? A friend and colleague said, screw it, I am not going to do it. He said he’d rather go skiing and drink beer than spend time writing these damn papers for another 6K a year. Of course he has no kids who are going to go to college and suck him dry. Ski away big fella- I have to get this done. I have written 11 pages of near BS and yet here I am. The last piece. I have four pages of really good stuff yet they say I can only submit three…

Get out the scissors. William Zinsser, in On Writing Well, which I have read multiple times, talks about stripping it down and building it back up. HA! I have to strip like a dancer and leave it lying near the pole. Ain’t no building it back up there Billy Z!

I start by chopping extraneous words. This just chops up my prose and makes me sound like robot. “I write well.” Whatever… After an hour of chopping and fixing, I still have 7 extra lines to get rid of. Something must go. It is like chopping off an arm! Everything is laid bare yet you still have to amputate something. I start with a little toe. A two-sentence line about my family. Of course in order for it to work I have to add a sentence to make it not sound stupid. Yee Haw! I am down to six lines! Sonofa… 45 minutes and half a bottle of wine later I am down to a single dang line of writing. I delete an entire sentence about how I impact the community in such positive ways. That is the point of the whole paper! How can I chop that? I don’t care. I am down to three pages. Spell check, save and forget about it!

Writing is cool. Rewriting sucks…