My favorite English teacher, Miss O, has given me a new exercise (the first homework I’ve received from her in some nine years), and it is that one writing assignment that I always hated: journaling. I’m fairly certain it’s the first time she ever gave me such an assignment. So I’ve decided to start this off the way I always dealt with both journaling and free-writing exercises in middle and high school: by writing about the assignment itself.

Hey, at least I’m not writing about how much I hate the assignment.

The reason for this is likely the same as the reason for which I’m even doing the “assignment” (since it’s no longer compulsory): I actually don’t hate it. Oh, I still can’t stand journaling in the traditional sense—that is, writing about your day, or what’s going on in your life, or what you’re currently thinking about—but this isn’t exactly that, to my great relief.

This is somewhere between that and the kind of journaling seen to be so vitally important in classroom’s across America today, wherein students write daily on some random (and usually inane) topic their teacher has chosen. (The absurd hyper-emphasis on this activity in high school English Language Arts classes across this country drives me batty.) This will be less about the personal and the day-to-day than the former, but more open-ended than the latter.

The bottom line is that I struggle to write. More accurately, I struggle to start writing. You can read more about that issue at Miss O’s blog (mostly here, and some here), where this issue was first raised (and where I received the assignment). The reality is that there is only one solution to my laziness- and intimidation-precipitated writer’s block: I have to write more.

For now, that may mean that I’m not yet writing about the things that I want to write about, the really good stuff. It may also result in some pretty awful writing—as in the case of this piece, for example. (Seriously, if you’re still reading this, then I apologize for thoroughly wasting minutes of your life that you’ll never get back.) But I remember when I first started writing song lyrics; the first songs I wrote were truly horrendous. No, really. The third song I ever wrote is still one of my favorites, to this day, but let me tell you… the one that came before it? It’s on this site, but it’s marked “Private” so that none of you can ever see it. And the one before that one, the very first song I ever wrote? So bad I literally threw it away at some point. I no longer have it, and I have yet to regret that.

It’s the same lesson I told to one young guitarist and aspiring song writer back in high school, one Jamie “Little T” Tjosvold: Your early work will suck, but you have to write it anyways, or you’ll never get to your best work. That’s the goal here. I’m out of practice, and it’s hard to get back into practice. The only way I know of to do that is just to start writing, even if I sometimes cringe at the result.

And I promise I’m done writing about the assignment.