I am stuck between two (possibly three) writing worlds, and I am intermingling them, and therefore making all of them horrid.

There was a time when I thought I could write anything. I had very solid notions of what writing was and what it could do. I believed writing was all about the audience. Take them on the journey. Invite them in. Give them hot chocolate. Put their feet up and let them settle in for a great story.

Then I went to Grad School, and I learned I didn’t know everything there was to know about writing. I learned that I can’t write anything with little effort. I realized that writing — real actual writing takes more than just slapping it on the page before deadline and sending it off for an editor or copywriter to deal with and then don’t read it when it’s published because you will cringe.

I am, I will admit, an Instant Gratification Writer. I have the ability to put together seemingly well-written prose with little effort. Some of my fellow bloggers, I’ve learned, write their blog posts in Word. They carefully edit and spell check, and strengthen their words. Me? No. I write directly into Typepad’s little window, hit the save button when I’m done and "poof" there it is for all to see — warts and all. Aren’t all of you lucky?

Why do I do this? Most of the time it’s because I don’t have time to do anything more. I once prided myself that I could do an interview, structure an article and send it on in less than a two-hour time frame. Now I think about doing that and I am shocked — how can I even pretend to know enough about someone in an hours time to craft their story and have it complete within another hour? How can I do them justice? But I know that I have, as much as journalism allows anyway.

But now I’m in a different writing world, and I’m trying, and journalism and audience keeps sneaking in there. For instance, I recently wrote a book review for a class. In one part of my book review, I wrote:

–

In 1986 Berman went to a tailor and was fitted for three suits, forking over $2,100.

"Custom clothing doesn’t happen overnight; about 10 weeks passed before my suits were ready," Berman writes. "When I was called in for the final fitting and saw the suits arrayed on overlapping hangers, I felt they were worth the wait. The fabric was beautiful; the cut was elegant. They were gorgeous suits.

"But they didn’t fit," Berman writes. "In the time it took to have them made, I’d already outgrown my beautiful new cloths."

He writes he gave the suits away 11 years later without ever wearing them.

—

And to the right of this, my professor wrote "Why in separate paragraphs?"

AGH!!!

It’s because I’m an idiot journalist who is unwilling to move out of the short paragraph structure even when I know better. It’s because I’ve been taught and do naturally to introduce quotes off by themselves in their own paragraph because it helps a reader (back to that audience awareness) and provides white space and a big neon sign that says "ooh, shiny thing, look at pretty talk!"

After all of that, I was reading in my Creative Nonfiction book. In particular, I read an essay by Lee Gutkind, "Becoming the Godfather of Creative Nonfiction." Gutkind was responding to an feature article by James Wolcott titled "Me, Myself and I," that criticized Creative Nonfiction as "confessional writing" and "navel gazing."

Gutkind comes back with his own thoughts about Wolcott, noting Wolcott admitted to learning most of what he knew about writing by working in the classified ad section of the Village Voice. "Journalists," Gutkind said, "have difficulty thinking in more than twelve column inches — a narrow format for an outsized subject. Creative nonfiction writers visualize in a world in three multicolored, multiconflicting dimensions."

But the relevant part, for me, is that journalists can’t think in more than 12 column inches. See, I even changed to the numeric 12. Ugh. Keep in mind that creative nonfiction is not academic writing either.

In journalism, the audience plays a huge part and everyone gets to come to the party. In academic writing, I’m learning, the point is often to exclude audience. And I’m struggling. And I need to quit struggling quickly.

One thing one of my professors suggested was a tailored editing process just for me based on my particular weaknesses. Me? Edit? Whoda Thunk. But I shall. Just not in my blog.

First of all, because I can…

I’ve never doubted my ability to write. It’s something that comes naturaly to me. But today, I got back my professor’s edits of my very first academic research paper.

Turns out, I can’t quite write "academic" yet. There’s a glimmer, but it’s not there.

I think I may show the paper to my English 103 students, just to let them see the amount of editing over every single one of the pages. I know that some of my students feel bad if there’s a lot of ink on their papers when I hand them back, but a lot of the time, I point out good things too.

I’m going to get this academic stuff. Pinky swear.