Making It Real

I just had another "breakthrough!" My breakthroughs are small and mostly realizations, and I have a new one about once a week, but still they're valuable to me. I go leaping and enthusing to The Man I Married to tell him all about it, and often it's such a trivial (or obvious) realization that he has to work at keeping a fascinated look on his face and say, "That's good!" when I pause for breath. However, knowing all that, I'm still excited, trivial or not. I was reviewing a paragraph I had just written, and it was clunky. I had rewritten it many times, and it was still clunky. It just wasn't "real." It was "writerish." I mentally smacked myself across the chops several times, and said to myself, "Okay, doofus. Forget about what you've got written. Pretend you're telling a gossipy anecdote and give us the sense of what you're saying. Out loud. Just the way you'd gab to a friend." And so I did. I fell over in amazement, then clawed my way back to the keyboard and got it written down. The sense was there and the paragraph was "real." The office cats will be hearing a lot of out loud gab from now on. Thanks for reading. Joan Sween.