about writing; she started keeping journals in fifth grade, but just now looked back at them for the first time (at age sixteen) and was mortified by the shallowness and stupidity of the entries.
I told her what I've told myself - something I did not make up: until you've made your first thousand mistakes, you can't correct them.
And I also told her that most people can't withstand the realization that their ambitious efforts have failed, and fall back to something easier, some arena where they already know the terrain and the adversaries, and success is a likelihood.
And I told her that it took me thirty years or more to learn how to write decently; but I then realized I had to qualify that by saying that I was only a part-timer - that a real player that jumped in the deep end could shorten that span by quite a bit.
And hoping I was telling the truth.
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