Writing on writing on writing

Greetings, friends!

My first weeks with Blue Stoop have been great. I’m having lots of fun with spreadsheets (very cool, I know) and am getting a quick education on grant writing and management, which seems less hard than I’d feared. It’s funny how many jobs break down into straightforward, easily mastered skills. Since 2022, I’ve read thousands of job descriptions, most of which required years of “experience,” which I didn’t have because no one trained me yet. With all due respect to any accomplished grant writers reading this, the job really comes down to writing coherent sentences, doing a bit of research, and managing a calendar. Easy enough.

Truly, most things are like that, including being a writer. Expertise is a conglomeration of smaller skills. It’s not necessarily the individual components that are inherently difficult: sensory description, convincing lines of dialogue, realistic settings, making routines, self-promotion. It’s the simultaneous juggling of all of it that’s hard…