Trying to Become a Writer

Trying to Become A Writer

I am a sixty-two year old man who has spent countless minutes, hours, days, months, and years trying to teach myself how to become proficient at writing so people can under
stand what it is that I am trying to say.

Because English is my second language, I have always had a difficult time with reading and writing. I read with a dictionary by my side. Everytime I come across a word that I do not understand, I open the dictionary and look up the word. I study the word's origion, definition, and parts of speech.Then I look at the word in its context in the sentence I am reading, and I write the word and the definition down in a notebook that I keep close to me. Over the years, I have been able to teach myself to read using this process. For the most part,it has been a strruggle and at the same time an enjoyable experience.

In addition to having difficulty with reading, I also have difficulty with writing. Subject and predicates confuse me. Pronouns and adjectives as well as adverbs and the other parts of speech make me scratch my head. I constantly wonder why I can't simply write without knowing what a subject is and why a predicate has to follow its subject. Having to Know the difference between a coordinating conjunction from a subordinating conjunction and where to place a comma when I write a compound sentence or an inverted sentence is foreign to me.

I have struggled with reading William Faulkner, Ernest Gibb, and Erskine Cauldwell, and othe writers. Hemingway is the only writer who doesn't confuse me.His writing style is   easy to understand. Faulkner, on the othe hand, gives me a headache. I have to have a bottle of asprin by my side when I try to read a book or short story he has written

I enjoy writing. I do not enjoy facing the blank page,and I suspect there is not a person who writes who does. Most of my experience with the written word has been in the arena of telling myself I can write something that is clear so...