Frustration about Writing

Now that we all know the Power of Writing from New Voice’s convincing essay, I also want to vent my frustration about learning （practicing） writing from my own personal experiences.

I like reading. I (have) liked reading Chinese novels since (I was in) elementary schools. When I was a kid, I used to spend all my spare time reading, even on(at) dinner tables (with my parents scolding me)despite my parents' scolding. To my credit, I read really fast, finishing one 500-page book in one day, and moving on to (the) next one the next (in the following) day. Sadly, this habit didn’t boost my writing or speaking skills, even in Chinese.The problem with my reading habit is that I never paid attention to how authors express their ideas or tell their stories, but only to the ideas and stories themselves. With a “scientific” mind which I have always been kind of proud of, I was trained to grasp the “truth” out of the “details”, keeping only the “truth” and discarding the “details”, believing that I could deducte the details later myself. Unfortunately, even though this trick might have worked for sciences (courses), it won’t work for writing and speaking, which require almost the opposite, describing a whole lot of details and sometimes, only the details.

To make matters even worse, I don’t like reading in English. I know I should. I pushed myself very hard several times in the past, but was never successful. I blamed this mainly for lacking (the lack )of vocabularies(y?) my limited vacabulary. But thinking of it (in retrospect) now, I believe the real reason is that I have already passed that(the) golden age for(of?) reading novels. I am not into other people’s stories that (as) much as (when) I was young, because I have so much of (am in struggle with?) my own stories every day stories to struggle with. I have no patience to read other people’s drama happened centuries ago any more because I need to take care of my own first. As a matter of fact, I stopped reading Chinese novels, too. Now, to kill time, I only watch the Chinese dating TV reality show, which gives me a false sense of reality by watching real people making fun of each other on stage.

As a woman, when I write, I have this (the) tendency of babbling about my own feelings. I read somewhere that this kind of tendency is considered ( as) one of the common drawbacks of women writers. We women tend to focus on our own emotions, our own and life stories, instead of the big picture about more important aspects of life, like (such as) morals of human race, like and (the) future of the world, etc. This critics (criticism) kind of ashamed pushed me futher away from writing, since I don’t want to embarrass myself and bother others with my own tiny little small world.  

But hey, after reading Eat Pray Love, I (have) regained my confidence. The book doesn't discuss anything serious. It uses short sentences. It talks about a woman’s own emotional journey. And it is "freakishly successful", as the author put it herself.

So, should I give it a try too?  Haha, that’s why I wrote this piece down here in(on) a sunny Sunday morning, in my pajamas with a cup of hot coffee, imagining traveling across (around) the world and writing down every （minor） details of my own thoughts to make a good living like her.

Bricks are certainly welcomed as always.