The Writing Blues

Writing has always been something that I've done, ever since I was little.

I remember writing stuff in elementary school. It was mostly fanciful, childish nonsense, but I remember writing it anyway. I grew up keeping an array of different journals and diaries and notebooks full with short stories, but I don't really think that I've ever written anything that has been especially memorable or especially commendable. So I don't pretend to be a good writer, just OK enough to scrape by in school with a B on most of my papers. I do, however, think I have had enough practice with writing to know that I can crank stuff out if I need or want to.

This internship, however, has proved me wrong in that capacity. As one of my final assignments for Mary, I'm supposed to turn in a few essays on some powerful and iconic women photographers and their work. I'm supposed to be writing about fairly well-known photographers (Julia Margaret Cameron, Anne Brigman and Diane Arbus) and I've done a lot of research on all of them. But for some reason, the words just aren't flowing and the essays I have written so far are crap to say the least.

It's not writer's block. I've had writer's block before. This is more than that. Every time I sit down to write, all the information I have just swirls in my head and I don't know where to begin, where to take the essay and how to end. Most of what I've written is all over the place (it's pretty sub-par in my opinion) and it's nothing worth writing home about. I know this shouldn't be hard for me, but somehow, it is. And it's so frustrating. I've never felt like this about any of my writing before, because I positively HATE everything I've written for Mary so far. And I don't think there's anything worth keeping here. And that sucks.

So I don't know what to do. I know I have to turn this in by tomorrow, but I don't want to. I definitely think that it's better to keep the crap stuff hidden or torn up than to have it put on the website for everyone to read.