The Sound of Silence

My first week back for my final semester as a student (thank god!), I had a meeting with my adviser Johanna Keller. And there, sitting in her office, she pursed her eyebrows together and said, "You know, I think your writing is your weakest point."

My response: "That's really depressing."

"No it's not," she said, smiling again. "We can fix that, it's not like you have a boring personality or a sloppy dresser."

That's how you know you're talking to a journalist, they go for the blood-filled artery when they speak to people. Especially when it's criticism.

Her suggestion for fixing this dilemma: get in touch with my creative side. "I want you to read novels, make your writing more literary," she said.

Wait, are we talking about journalism or fiction writing? In the 10 commandments of journalism, it usually states that fiction and journalism are two different things and never the twain shall meet. Fox News notwithstanding.

But I have been taking her advice to heart because at this point, what do I have to lose. And who knows, it might make the writing fun again, instead of what it has become for me, endless work and thus dry.

So I've been reading, besides my daily blog posts and "New York Times," I've been reading more books. I checked out a Nabokov novel last week, I'm going to try to get to it after I finish a series of essays about art from Times art critic Michael Kimmelman.

And I'm drawing again, those aren't as good as they used to be since I haven't picked up a drawing pencil in a little more than a year. But it's not just to be a better writer, it's to not center my life on any one thing. And to inspire some creativity in other arenas.

Because you write about what you know. So everything you do informs your writing. Perhaps being silent for a while, and taking it a bit easy on the output of words, will open up my brain to looking at things in terms of colors and metaphors, rather than observing what I see. Because not every writer produces work in the same manner. Perhaps I'm not meant to be Stephen King and produce 2,000 words a day.

I'm finding my own routine this semester.

At the very least I'm a little bit more relaxed now.

Now let's see if that will make a difference in the writing. Watch what happens.