My Life as a Writer

Today I wrote...

• an email about an upcoming training
• a coaching log entry
• an activity to use with the December Book of the Month Bad Kitty (Bruel)
• several calendar updates for school visits
• a post it note to a teacher outlining a task for the Literacy Team
• an outline and protocol for reading Chapter 4 in Mosaic of Thought (Keene, Zimmermann)
  
• another email following up on a previous school visit
• several Twitter posts (some related to work and one not so much)
• a text message responding to a parent about the cost of the Thanksgiving Feast for visitors
• directions on how to access the Math Navigator sites and information on screenings
• a gift exchange form for next month's holiday lunch with the leadership team
• an online form to renew my membership in the International Reading Association
• another post it note to remind me of a classroom observation tomorrow
• a phone number for the help desk
• several terms for a Google search
• and the first few letters of many websites for Firefox to auto complete before selecting one or another to visit

Some days I add charting to this list, or lesson plans, or directions, or descriptions. Blog posts, like today, can be part of my writing. I'm sure I do more writing now that I'm out of college than I ever did when I was in college.

What I don't do is write creatively. Now it's not to say I don't try to put a creative spin on my technical writing, but for the most part I have no desire to do much in other genres of writing. 

I think in images. Given a choice between describing a scene in writing, visually or orally I would chose the visual every time. Today, with my journal in my lap, watching a lesson, my fingers itched for my camera. Not a word was written down during the lesson. What I took away was the image in my mind of the shy smile one of the boys had when the teacher praised his reading. 

It took me a long time to wrap my mind around starting a blog. Truth be known, I was shooting for a podcast but decided to start small. My writing is for everyone else but me. That's my life as a writer.