I waited too long. It's now Wednesday, I've made very little headway, and I feel exhausted because I've spent the wee hours of each morning industriously avoiding my paper.
Gotta relax. I'm stuck in a psychological bind of my own making: when I'm intellectually alert, I'm so anxious and self-critical that my automatic writer's block shuts down any effort to get to work. When I'm tired and feeling like a zombie, I'm sufficiently zoned out to sit in front of my paper for hours, but I can fit neither ideas nor words together.
We'll see how this turns out.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
On the writing process
It's paper time-- first paper of the term, 7 pages long, on Defoe's Roxana.
It seems eminently do-able, and yet I often feel so overwhelmed when I sit down in front of that blank screen. After all these years I still have no sure-fire method for (1) arriving at an insightful thesis about some work of literature and (2) expressing it cogently in English. The brainstorming process lasts a long, long time with me-- right now I'm staring at three pages of crabbed notes that attempt to link together disparate themes as various as "disguise and multiple identities," "tension between proper names and generic titles," and "the relationship of anonymizing dashes to the concept of suppositional personhood." But a long list of loosely related themes, even if they are meticulously grounded in textual evidence, does not a thesis make. Somehow I have to kick this list of transcribed and expanded marginalia up to the level of an actual argument.
I have only the dimmest memories of the psychology of paper-writing from the last 50 times (or so) that I did this. I open those paper files now (in particular one on orality in Petronius's Satyricon, composed Fall 2004), they look reasonably intelligent and polished, and it's like, how'd that happen?
And this is only the idea stage! The writing process, for me, is typically longer, more painful, and less exciting than the crabbed-note process, where anything goes and new discoveries come with regularity. I think the Petronius paper was the last time I wrote in an orderly fashion, when I actually knew what I planned to write before I started putting together sentences. For the 5-6 longer papers that I subsequently wrote, I started composing text out of desperation about deadlines. After I had several pages of unfocused text, I chopped and glued and jammed them together into something resembling a forced argument, and continued from there. That's not the ideal way to do this.
The deadline for this paper on Roxana is already looming-- it's on Friday. I had noble ideas about working on this steadily over the course of two weeks, and that hasn't happened. I absolutely must, must generate two pages of usable text by the end of today-- say, 9:00, to give myself time to inhale another 200 pages of Clarissa tonight.
Papers always push me into spewing a constant ticker-tape of self-talk, so, invisible readers, pardon me if I stick that here. No fear. Just excitement, diligent work, and self-forgiveness for language or ideas that aren't very good. Keep starting if you find your mind wandering. You've done this many, many times before, and your spouse reassures you that the quality of your mind hasn't changed over the past 5 years. You've also signed up to do this for a living, after all, and the university *pays* you to write these papers! Would you rather be composing reports on widget advertising budgets?
It seems eminently do-able, and yet I often feel so overwhelmed when I sit down in front of that blank screen. After all these years I still have no sure-fire method for (1) arriving at an insightful thesis about some work of literature and (2) expressing it cogently in English. The brainstorming process lasts a long, long time with me-- right now I'm staring at three pages of crabbed notes that attempt to link together disparate themes as various as "disguise and multiple identities," "tension between proper names and generic titles," and "the relationship of anonymizing dashes to the concept of suppositional personhood." But a long list of loosely related themes, even if they are meticulously grounded in textual evidence, does not a thesis make. Somehow I have to kick this list of transcribed and expanded marginalia up to the level of an actual argument.
I have only the dimmest memories of the psychology of paper-writing from the last 50 times (or so) that I did this. I open those paper files now (in particular one on orality in Petronius's Satyricon, composed Fall 2004), they look reasonably intelligent and polished, and it's like, how'd that happen?
And this is only the idea stage! The writing process, for me, is typically longer, more painful, and less exciting than the crabbed-note process, where anything goes and new discoveries come with regularity. I think the Petronius paper was the last time I wrote in an orderly fashion, when I actually knew what I planned to write before I started putting together sentences. For the 5-6 longer papers that I subsequently wrote, I started composing text out of desperation about deadlines. After I had several pages of unfocused text, I chopped and glued and jammed them together into something resembling a forced argument, and continued from there. That's not the ideal way to do this.
The deadline for this paper on Roxana is already looming-- it's on Friday. I had noble ideas about working on this steadily over the course of two weeks, and that hasn't happened. I absolutely must, must generate two pages of usable text by the end of today-- say, 9:00, to give myself time to inhale another 200 pages of Clarissa tonight.
Papers always push me into spewing a constant ticker-tape of self-talk, so, invisible readers, pardon me if I stick that here. No fear. Just excitement, diligent work, and self-forgiveness for language or ideas that aren't very good. Keep starting if you find your mind wandering. You've done this many, many times before, and your spouse reassures you that the quality of your mind hasn't changed over the past 5 years. You've also signed up to do this for a living, after all, and the university *pays* you to write these papers! Would you rather be composing reports on widget advertising budgets?
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