Because I know my learning style has changed as I've grown older. I used to be the type-1 classroom sort, and type-3 how things are put together bored me to tears. I've become a very type-4 dynamic learner, with a curiosity if not an aptitude for the type-3 how things work style. Initially I thought I had changed, but I am starting to think it is the nature of what is being learned that is particularly suited to one learning style over another.
Example: you can't learn martial arts from a book. I'm sorry, you simply cannot. You have to do it 10,000 times, and the first 10,000 don't count. Acting is another one that is all type 3 and 4. You can get all the theory in your head that you want, but ultimately you have to get out there and do it. If you don't have that emotional core, no amount of theory or technique is going to matter. It's like learning a language, you study and study and study and practice and practice and practice. If you have "it", that thing in your brain that suddenly gets it, then one day the penny drops and you find yourself speaking a second language naturally. Some people just never get there. They can learn to speak well, but it is always an arduous intellectual exercise beginning with the thought in their first language and forcing it through all these mechanisms and protocols to make it come out in Italian or French or Portuguese.
Writing is definitely one of those dynamic things. Writers write. Like actors, we've got this bone in their head. It's just what we have to do. Over the weekend, I was introduced to what Josh Whedon did to keep the wheels oiled during the writers strike…
Writers write. Here endeth the lesson.
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