Genetics! Cake!

I have never liked writing. In high school, college and sometimes even now spelling, pronunciation, word usage, meanings and the like have always eluded me. Even blogging requires a lot of spell check, dictionary and thesaurus use. (It took me three tries to spell that correctly. And is that the right way to use tries? See what I mean.)

My daughter is brilliant. She actually tests for a high IQ. She's witty. She reads ALL THE TIME. She has a much better grasp of grammar than I do, and gets As in science and math. But she doesn't like to write. She says that she "can't write" but I really think she suffers from the same writers block that I do. I suppose it can be defined as "can't write" though the "can't" isn't tied to ability or even motivation.

We talked last night about how we write in the smallest terms possible. We think complicated but cannot put it to paper. So, a complex sentence about, say, eating, desiring, wanting a delicious, decadent, forbidden piece of cake is written - "Cake now." and loses something in translation. It results in many assignments that say "needs more detail" and "expand that thought."

I am truly not sure how to help my daughter except to say that the more you write the less difficult it becomes. I am blogging as a forum for emptying my head of all these complex thoughts. And hopefully, she will find a forum for all those thoughts that works for her. I certainly hope so, as frankly, she's genetically pre-disposed to running unpleasant thoughts over and over in her head. But that's her father's fault.