What I really want is insight, constructive understanding. This feminine business of intuition annoys me. It is like when I was in highschool and was terrible at Latin grammar and declensions, and yet did well in later years with translation. This makes no sense. Similarly, I can't remember any of basic grammatical analysis of English I was taught, but ask me to do final year process type analysis and I bet I can still do it. It vexes me to no end.
As the end of my writing experiment comes into view, an experiment which has at least yielded a short story, it occurs to me that in spite of a degree, well, two, in English lit, I can't analyse writing worth anything. Oh I can make stuff up, interpret away until I'm halfway through a Ph.D., but doing the truly writerly thing of looking a the cogs and wheels is very hard for me. Give me an exercise and I will write with a good understanding of what I am doing, but I am terrible at understanding other people's writing, and really even my own when I write freely, and am scrambling to acquire a vocabulary to do so. Yet I have control, I am confident in how I use the tools I have. My effects, for the most part, are conveyed as intended.
At the the end of the day I feel like someone in that episode of Blackadder with Tom Baker as the legless captain saying "My lady, you have a woman's brain!"
Alas.
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