shorties weblog - www.shorties.nl

4 april 2008
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Those damned columns! For almost a year I don't seem to succeed in writing them. At least not as many of them as I would like. I in fact wrote quite a few. But maybe I just became more critical over my own work than I was before. Or maybe I did not do so well in writing them. In any case I didn't think they were good enough. Next to that I am worried that I might have tackled almost any subject before in a previous column. But this is column no. 616 or so in seven years time, what do you think?! And what is against trying to do better a second time? I might even discover that my writing skills have improved over time.

Still, I tend to feel unhappy not being able to write my little texts. At least not those that I think are good enough to release on the web. People close to me sometimes ask: what I think myself what kind of person that I am. Some kind of a technical wizard? A photographer maybe? Or a sharp flattering conversationalist? Answering truly, deep from the inside a am a writer. I really am. No matter whether I am a good one or one really bad.

As a seventeen year old I once wanted to paint. Modern art. My family didn't agree. As well as my at the time to-be-family-in-law. My father didn't say so much that he didn't approve, but judging by his face as I ever mentioned the subject it was all evidently clear. Just how much my to be brother in law and his mother didn't understand became visible as brother-in-law came to me at the moment I was accepted by a technical school for a four-year-education. He told about his cousin who was a contractor and said: "You always said you wanted to paint? Now cousin Jaap is looking for painters for his most recent construction job..." Going to art school just didn't cross my mind at that time. And whether I would have been motived enough to really make it work I don't know too because I never tried.

Being 22 years old I started to write. Compensation perhaps, I think hind sightedly. My creativity just had to find its way out, one way or another. I liked writing, but the real passion for it only came after a course for wannabe writers which was co-written by Dutch poet/songwriter and Swiss origin Heinz Polzer, drs. P. Polzer showed how flexible our Dutch language is in adapting a sentence and letting it sound better without changing the meaning of it. And what beautiful texts that process amounts to. (He surely must be a foreigner to see something like that). With the introduction of text editors, that make cutting and pasting text really easy I was definitely hooked.

Now only some rotten columns that I just really want to write, and some good ones preferably. Perhaps just as good as I think this one is.