NaNoWriSpr: On Vising and Revising

Here's the primary difference between what I'm doing this spring in what I'm calling NaNoWriSpr, in which I'm trying to write most of a 75,000 word novel in 4 months, and what is usually attempted during NaNoWriMo, in which writers try to write 50,000 words in a month: I'm researching, planning and especially revising as I go.

Of course, this doesn't mean I hadn't planned and researched in advance. I didn't have an outline, but I'd first conceived the novel (and written the first two paragraphs) in 2007. I've been researching on and off since then. And starting last fall but particularly over the Christmas break I tried to finish reading what I thought were the primary research texts, having all the supplementary ones (I thought) ready to go for when I needed them. I had a big picture idea of what might happen in my story, at least the first part, and the primary characters were coming into view.

And I am so glad I wasn't thinking I had done enough to plow this out in a month or two.

See, this is a complex novel, and as I'd mentioned, it's set in a different place and time. I had looked into the era a little bit--read a book or two--and had done a heck of a lot more research on certain aspects of the story and its genre, but that didn't mean I'd read enough memoirs of the time or the times before that my characters would have lived through or had read through enough books or articles about my setting and events of the period. I'd spent a lot of time developing my main character and getting into his head, but I still felt some distance from him and was still working to get to know the others.

And so the first stages and drafts of the early chapters have taken a lot of what I've come to call vising time: others might call it visioning or planning. I've needed to immerse myself by researching the era and reading memoirs and watching documentaries, much as one seeks to learn a language by immersion.

And like learning a language, I've of course tried writing about these people and their times and given the early efforts to a few other people to see whether they felt I was getting it right to communicate engagingly with the modern reader (which is of course the bigger trick, as in this case I'm learning a language only for translation to those who aren't familiar with it). The workshops in my fiction-writing class have been tremendously helpful in this, as have a few helpful friends.

As with learning a language, they've been kind in these early efforts to point out the places where I wasn't quite getting it right. This has supplemented the clarity a sleep can bring to my own distance from my writing to see where it can be improved. And both processes have encouraged me to go back and hone my writing to make sure I was going in the right direction. I'm still working on this, but I can already tell the efforts have borne fruit.

See, for me, I really can't imagine trying to make a draft without all of these processes involved at once, which is why NaNoWriSpr feels so much more reasonable and manageable than NaNoWriMo to me. At the same time, I'm thankful for the NaNoWriMo model, as it reminds me it's okay to push myself and that immersion in the writing act is a useful way to go.

So even though I haven't technically hit my "new pages" limits,  I'm pleased to announce that I've written 60 on-their-way-to-good pages with six weeks down and ten to go.  I'm thrilled about this, in fact, as the early parts of the novel are the most important to get just right in so many ways, and now that I know where I'm going and I've introduced most of my characters it will go faster, I hope.  But even if I stick to my 10 pages per week average (which wouldn't be surprising as I expect to continue to revise a lot as I go, and the amount of pages for revising continues to grow) I'll get to my goal within six or seven months, with a much much better draft than I had for my Novel in a Drawer after I finished the first draft in 18 months.

I'm getting better at this. And faster. I can tell. Which is encouraging, as this is a much more complex project than the previous one.

Man, this is fun. Exhausting at times, but fun.

A Week in the Life of NaNoWriSpr (Week 2)

Tuesday hits, which is the formal ending and beginning of your weeks (since that's when your writing class meets): it turns out you only have 15 pages when you wanted 20 per week. Since you are as neurotic as the next writer, you go between praising yourself for getting 15 done and berating yourself for not doing as much as you wanted to. Then you work to adjust your expectations while not giving yourself excuses. Delicate work, that. In the evening, you work on some teaching prep, trying to get ahead for the next week, since that's your first priority.

Wednesday/Thursday: Between teaching tasks, you finish up the first chapter and revise it, adding 4 pages in the process. You share it with a delightfully helpful friend who tells you she is engaged by it. You are simultaneously encouraged and in despair because you have very little idea what's going to happen in the next chapter, which now feels like your sophomore music album. Will it ever measure up? And what's going to happen in it?

Friday: You bury yourself in research into place and era, not exactly knowing what you're looking for but hoping it will help you see ahead into what the heck happens in the next chapter and how it fits with your overall plot arcs. You also brainstorm some of the secondary characters with a friend via chat. Things are still murky--oh so murky. On Friday night you start to seriously panic, since your week is half done and you've only written 4 pages. This novel will never go anywhere, clearly. Nevertheless, you try to hold firm. Ultimately, you go to bed, as you've learned that always helps.

Saturday: You awake to find that things have begun to come together. As you learned during your last novel-writing project (for your Novel in a Drawer), chaos periods always resolve in epiphany, and the panic fades into a funny story to tell about the writing process. You proceed to write 12 pages in a few hours, pleased as punch you've brought up your week's total to 16 pages as well as that you didn't resort to using cliches like "pleased like punch" often within those pages. Even though you now have a ton of teaching prep to do on Monday, you'll be okay with your weekly totals even if you don't have time to write more on Monday or Tuesday afternoon. Plus you know at least a bit of what's happening in the next few scenes, which makes you feel all luxurious, as though you can pick it up and put it down as you wish without being dependent on the fickle muse.

Sunday: You get to have a day of rest, and you take it gleefully, enjoying the opportunity to read fiction. Time to get to read just for fun for a bit and truly relax, though at the end of the day you sneak in a quick read of the stories you have to discuss in Tuesday's writing class so your brain can give them a mull. You also have to submit chapter 1 for workshopping by Tuesday, so you stay up a bit later than usual to revise your chapter a bit more, just because it's fun.

Monday: You throw yourself into finishing your teaching prep for the week, knowing that the more you get done today the more writing time you'll have the rest of the week. You have enough time to finish your teaching tasks, and you feel like you've begun to get the balance of the shifts between your teaching stuff and this creative task. You feel like you might make it through both these semester-long tasks without ruining the semester's transmission. And since you've already glanced at your writing class assignments that you need to finish up before your 4 p.m. Tuesday class, you have a shot at writing more chapter 2 on Tuesday after teaching, which means you could reach your 20 pages.

On the eve of week 3: You know there will be more peaks and valleys, but having plowed out 31 pages in 2 weeks feels good (10% there!). Beginning to (re)gain faith in the process, even while knowing there will be more low points in the weeks ahead. Getting started is hard, but worthwhile. Having conquered the first few challenges is lovely, especially since you managed to complete all your other responsibilities this week as well, even exercising 3 times. And good groundwork has been laid for future chapters.  Woohoo!

Okay, back to finishing the week's lesson plans. Almost there!

NaNoWriSpr Goals and Challenges

Yesterday for my fiction-writing class, I was asked to write "a paragraph" about my fiction-writing goals for the semester. The following is an adjusted version of what I wrote:

My primary goal for my fiction-writing this semester is to either have a rough draft or most of a rough draft of a novel manuscript by the end of the semester, reaching roughly between 250 and 300 pages. In order to reach this goal, I realize I must write between 70-80 pages per month, or 15-20 pages per week (totaling between 3500 and 5000 words per week). This first week I reached my goal, but just barely, by writing 15 pages, for just over 3500 words. As per the syllabus, I want to revise 30-40 pages of this draft by the end of the semester and have it be more polished. I want to choose segments for workshopping and polishing more based on how important they are to get feedback for rather than merely what I have done. And so I want to work hard so I have choices about what to share and not share. That said, I know I’ll want my instructor and my classmates to give me feedback on the first 10-15 pages, and blessedly that’s already drafted after this past week. 

I don’t want to accept meaningless procrastinatory excuses from myself for not doing the work. I know I’ll have to change stuff after the semester—the primary goal is to get something down on paper so I can work with it further this summer. But while this draft is largely a “s***ty first draft” (cf. Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird) I also don’t want to push myself so hard to produce pages that the work has holes the size of Texas, especially at the expense of a logical and complex plot or characterization that goes along with that. Nor, since I’m writing a piece set in a different time and place, do I want to sacrifice key research that I must do and then have to rewrite large sections because of a major anachronism or something that wouldn’t happen in that place. 

So while I fully expect to make changes (and likely large changes) after the semester ends, I also want to think deeply enough about what’s going on in my opening acts that pulling it all together in the end will be relatively easy. That means I will have to be okay with going a little slower in the beginning when I’m laying the groundwork (probably in the 15 pages per week phase, with a lot of thinking and outlining time to go with it), but will hopefully have a little easier time once my characters have been established. At that point, I hope to legitimately expect more pages from myself to “make up time.” 

I’ll also have slower going in the beginning is because I’m still doing some of my background research. For instance, I just got a few more books through interlibrary loan that will provide me with useful background info for my era and setting. I know this specific set of research tasks will bear a lot of fruit in furnishing me with vivid and apt material for characterization and setting details, but I’ll have to work extra-hard both to get through this material fast and to not get too distracted by all the other research I could be doing. Thankfully I have a lot of experience in researching quickly. (God bless grad school.) Hopefully, if I can do this and still get 15 pages per week written in the next few weeks, I can get up to 20 or even 25 later on. 

Current word total, after one week: 3531 words. 15 pages. 

15 down, 235-285 to go. This may seem daunting, but through baby steps is totally possible. Go team NaNoWriSpr!

On Celebrating New Phases

I like to start things slow. I like to work my way into things. Dwell on them for as much time as it takes. Take my time.

While some delight in the early stages of dating, for instance, I wasn't a big fan at most points in my single life. No, for me the delightful deeper understanding of a long-term relationship.

Same with most things, for the most part. I don't mind going to new places, per se, or experiencing new things, but in the novelty vs. stability dialectic, I will usually vote for stability, at least when it comes to from scratch starts.

The fact that I'm loving the beginning of this DNiP* at this point is a misdirection, in a way. After all, it's been 5-6 years since I first conceived the idea for this project, and I just recently made a judgment call that I'd done enough research, let it simmer enough, and had enough slackening in my schedule of other responsibilities to commit it to paper with fear and trembling balanced with a measure of confidence for reasons I've already discussed in recent posts.

Which is to say that the type of novelty I absolutely adore involves entering new phases of larger projects once I'm into them. That's the kind of beginning I can get behind completely.

And that's the type of beginnings I'm entering on in this, my second semester of teaching at this particular university. In my teaching, I'm feeling profoundly blessed to be revising and extending courses and course concepts I've taught before, and in some classes teaching the same students I've already gotten to know and who have already gotten to know me. It's marvelous. While there are great parts to teaching a class the first time, I always feel like it's a first draft that had way too many things that ought not have been released yet, especially when I'm teaching it to a new set of students with an inevitably different student culture from the places I'd previously taught. First drafts, as Anne Lamott points out, are inevitably flawed. And so, in my opinion, are first semesters. On the other hand, second teaching semesters=fabulous opportunities to fix many of the most glaring flaws (and hopefully some of the smaller ones as well).

In creative writing territory, as mentioned above, while I'm not revising, I'm entering a new phase for which I largely feel ready. The fiction-writing seminar starts on Tuesday, and the way has been cleared. Five large recipes have been cooked in recent days, with the leftovers in the freezer to pull out as needed. My syllabi and lesson plans for the early parts of my teaching semester have been written. The online course environment has been set up with the most crucial documentation, and reasonable self-deadlines set up for other teaching-related tasks in the near future. The novel's background research has largely been completed, except for that which will be manageable to do during the writing of the first draft (and for that, the books and articles have been gathered for easy access). The plot and characters have been slowly forming in my thoughts and through notes. It's time--finally--to start writing the thing.

Three cheers for beginnings of new phases of projects already begun! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

*Dear Novel-in-Progress

Ph.Did

I can't believe it's been 10 days since I crossed that stage, was hooded by my advisor, and shook the Purdue president's hand. And today, finally, it said in the online transcript system that it was official--that a degree had been awarded.

It's real. I'm done. So they tell me.

I still probably won't believe it until I hold the real diploma in my hands, which should be in the next couple of weeks.

But I'm done. The dissertation was deposited and officially accepted by the university. I'm free to move on to push its research deeper, to seek publication in the academic realms for articles related to it, to move eventually to other related and unrelated research questions.

I'm free, now that the dissertation has been approved, to also immerse myself in other non-academic projects as well, when teaching permits.

And now that I've slept a bit more, have begun to come down from an incredibly stressful year, am beginning to see the fog clear around me, I'm excited to move into a new school year with new syllabi and lesson plans. And I'm beginning to get excited about some of these writing projects as well.

But I need to read some poetry first. It's been a long year with lots of words having been plowed out on demand--I need to remind myself that word play is possible.

I Blame the Dissertation

Yes, yes, I know. I've been gone a lot lately. Absent from these pages in much the same way the sun is often seemingly absent from the winter sky.

I blame the dissertation. It's a lot of work.

Well worth doing. And most days I still really get into the topic.

But it's a lot of work.

The kind that will probably keep me from regularly updating this blog much for a couple more months yet, at least.

On the up side, I'm glad to hear that they'll be discussing my "Cooking Chicken Wat" essay in The Spirit of Food (see a couple posts back for the link) over at the book study group at www.thehighcalling.org. Tomorrow. So go check it out.

Or if you're coming from there, welcome. I will start posting here again at some point in the next few months, I promise. And in the meantime would love to respond to comments.

Maybe if you comment enough I might even start posting again sooner.

Correction 1/24/11: Fixed the link (oops!).

Drafting Away

So this year reminds me a lot of my MA thesis year. I feel like I'm getting into a rhythm like I did then: teaching certain days, writing others. Training my mind to let the academic thoughts simmer in their polysyllabic stew during spare moments until it's time for them to be served. Feeling the pressure about writing a large document and needing to produce those words on schedule. All the same, enjoying the thinking and the writing.

There's one key difference, however: I'm better at letting those words come out faster. Of course, it helps that the meat of this topic has largely been marinating in my head for 3 years now. But it also helps that I've had lots of coursework semesters and the Big Nasty Exams to force me to write a lot in a short period of time.

Specifically, to force me to be okay with writing first drafts at first. That's important, because that's always been the hardest part for me. Once I've gotten something down on paper, I can do something with it. Of course, I know this draft I'm working on needs a lot of revision. But the fact that it's gradually growing in page count is an important thing. One I'm grateful for.

Thriving in the Third Year

So I'm learning/remembering a lot about my preferred working style/kind of life (including the writing life) by my first month of this, the third year of my PhD. Mostly, I'm confirming that I was right about myself, in that I thrive better when I don't have to take 3 classes while also doing a million other things.

It's not that I'm not fantastically busy. In fact, if possible, I'm busier than I was last year. But I'm finding that I enjoy the academic life much much more when I have more of a say in what I do when.

It's not that I don't have deadlines now: quite firm ones at times. I must finish these preliminary exams by September 24, for instance, because I'm given a month to do that. And I have a month to defend the exams. But I negotiated the timing of that, and have been able to choose what kinds of questions I wanted to take/prepare for when.

I chose to do this now, at the beginning of the semester, before my students have their major assignments due. This small juggling act I'm allowed to do allows me to be a better teacher, because I won't have so much other craziness at the end of the semester.

It also allows me to really focus on writing these prelims well, because while I have lesson planning (and have been really enjoying planning lessons this semester without 3 classes at the same time--having a chance to use my creativity to make up good new interactive activities), I don't have a huge amount of grading to do until the prelims are done.

It helps all of this so much that I only have one (last required) class I'm taking. I really like taking classes, but am glad the crazy 3-per-semester requirement is done.

I can begin to see the end of the tunnel a bit, and that helps too. After all, if I pass these exams, I'll be officially qualified to teach at the university level. After that, (just?) the dissertation, which is a topic I'm incredibly motivated to dig further into and have already collected and written a lot of material towards. (And since writing is my thing, and I wended my way through writing a 100 page MA thesis only a couple of years ago, the length of it doesn't overwhelm me too much. At least not at the moment.)

So, while I'm fantastically busy, I'm not minding that. I'm really enjoying this academic life of mine.

Offline

I'm on vacation as of later today. Granted, it will be a vacation in which I haul a large chunk of my books and binders for studying for my Big Nasty Tests with me, but still a vacation. I may post sometime early next week, but then I'll be offline for a week and a half.

It will probably be quite productive for my studying, though I would still prefer to have a laptop to take with me to type things in. Ah well, I'll survive, and likely thrive outside of those times when I have the deep urge to retrieve or create a new studying document.

Down to It (Once Again)...

Remember that paper that was originally due May 20 and is now due on June 15? After a week of doing practically nothing, I wrote 12 pages of it yesterday. I also started on the article I'm writing for next week's catapult.

Since I'm leaving town early Sunday morning, it was sort of important that I get going on these things, so I'm glad it's finally starting to flow properly.

So I've got to do another 10 or 12 pages on the paper today (which will leave me with a hopefully fairly good rough draft), plus finishing the rough draft on the catapult article before packing for my week away.

Saturday is for revision.

The most encouraging thought is that I still took a lot of breaks and spent a lot of time procrastinating yesterday. So if I cut back on that today, I might be able to plow through this in better time and get done with one or two other things I need to get done, while also sleeping both nights I have left.

After all, it's a long solo road trip next week, so being rested is important. Sleep is good.

Oh, and word counts: 3438 on the paper so far and 125 on the catapult article. Not bad for one day.

Writing Practices: On the Beauty of Lists

So yesterday I made a list.

It's a beautiful list.

It contains all of the things I want/need to get done this summer, complete with estimates of how long I want/need to devote to each item.

It includes studying for the Big Nasty Tests and work for my assistantship at the top. But fun stuff is on the list too, as are my creative projects.

It's remarkably lovely to have a list. Before, it felt like the pressure of the unwritten things to do was clogging the artery my motivation was supposed to be spouting up from (sorry, gross metaphor, there).

Anyway, I even pencilled in time for sleep.

It's a lot like a time budget, really. You know how they say that having a budget means you get to spend a certain amount each month for those things on your list? That's how I feel.

Now we'll see if I can do it. That's another story.

But it feels more manageable now that I have a list.

Confession is Good for the Soul

Okay, so on Saturday, after my big breakthrough on my papers, I seemed to be barred from proceeding much of anywhere on them by, well, disinclination. Or something. So until 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. at night, I was rather less productive than I wanted to be.

I hate that--sheesh, if I had known that ahead of time, I could have driven somewhere with a forest and taken a 6-hour hike or something. Which would have been supremely productive on such a beautiful day in the lower 80s F.

Oh well. I did pull myself together well enough at 11 p.m. to write up a close-to-1000 word outline of my ideas for paper #2 before writing up a review sheet for my students and crashing at 2 a.m.

What all this means is that I have a lot to do this week, and must not have more of such lapses. I hope and pray that I don't have them, and that everything gets done.

On Staying Upright While Surfing a Tsunami

Very...difficult... Must concentrate....Back to piles of reading lest I fall over from lack of concentration. Got to...stay...upright.

Surfing a semester tsunami can be a mite challenging, after all.

Okay, back to it. The sooner I can plow through this week's readings, the sooner I can get to getting ahead on my writing and research for my final papers for the semester, two of which are in my dissertation domain and the other which is helping me do background research for a novel I have in mind.

Ah, the joys of feeling the intrinsic desire to stay upright through the last few weeks of this semester, understanding why I really want to do this well rather than slough off... I'm quite blessed to have figured out how to multi-purpose my academic projects, and pick ones not only that really genuinely interest me, but also flow into other academic and creative goals I have. Which in turn gives me super-strong motivation to do them, and do them well.

Woohoo! Surfing can indeed be fun at times.

On Knocking Down Them There Walls

I'm pleased that the mojo came back (i.e., that I was able to pull through my spring break and balance the academic tasks I needed to get done with having time also to spend adequate time with people, get a bit caught up on my sleep, and get caught up on some of that impinging life stuff).

As to why it feels like the mojo's back to stay for awhile, I think part of that has to do with some success in the purpose of this blog--being able to knock down the walls in my mind between academic writing and creative writing in my head and heart. This blog has helped me not to privilege one over the other (as I had been doing) and to interrogate the reasons I might be doing so.

By knocking down that wall, I'm looking forward to clearing head space for both of these facets of my writerly self to continue to develop, as well as leaving room for more life events to take place around them. As a result, I'm ready to plunge back into the last six weeks of the semester, viewing them and their likely-accompanying tsunami wave-ishness as a necessary part of the writing life right now.

Not necessarily that they are the writing-life-as-usual, or that the craziness is the way life ought to be all the time, but it feels like if I can surf this wave, I'll be delivered safely to the next stage of my writing life, which will start in the summer with balancing my preparation for the Big Nasty Exams I hope to take in the fall with other writing tasks, and is likely to be a bit more like paddling in a canoe than riding a tsunami.

Since tsunami waves can come when you think it's just a puddle, though, it feels good to know how to do both phases of the writing life when the situation arises.

Mission Accomplished

It's been lovely, having a quieter week on the academic front.

Of course, a quieter week still included a couple of stacks of grading along with some reading, planning discussion questions based on that reading, doing my taxes, and writing 10 pages of that conference paper that's due at the same time (early May) as my other final papers for my courses.

But still, I managed to take some time off--even had Thursday and Friday completely off, and today I managed to create ten pages of rough draft for the conference paper in less than 5 hours, which is a lovely thing.

I like this, as it feels like I'm getting good habits that might be somewhat reliable and maintainable in later times. I've pushed through a time of difficult something-or-other with my writing life (both academic and otherwise), and it's lovely here on the other side, where I can predict fairly well what is accomplishable in a week (even if some of it might take a trifle bit longer, some things will take less than I feared) and go on to do it in a relatively efficient time period, but without sacrificing on quality.

This bodes well for the summer, in which I will have to balance my writing, research, and studying tasks in my "spare" time, and even later on, when I will be working on my dissertation in my "spare" time. This reminds me that I've been looking forward to the end of my coursework for a reason--once I find something I want to write about, whether it's academic or creative, I greatly enjoy doing it, and when the mojo is there, I can keep the flow going even while I pause to enjoy the tasks I'm doing and fully appreciate the times in-between when I can balance those writing tasks with other life things, including just enjoying the world and the people in it.

This is a good thing. I'm quite thankful that it's been granted to me, just now.

On Survival (i.e., Hercules pt. 3), and Good Books

Well, it seems I made it through the week and was given the grace to do some things I wasn't sure I could do: writing a 7-page midterm in-class open-book exam question in just over 2 hours, for instance (good practice for prelims). Or making it through an 11-hours-at-school day (yesterday) on 3 hours of sleep.

I'm not sure it makes me Hercules or anything, but I'm pleased that I managed to get it all done, including writing my article for catapult's new issue, which, being called "Good Books" was too tempting for me to pass up. Check it out, and enjoy!

Woohoo! Now after some packing and such, I get to enjoy a Spring Break in which I'll be...well, still doing a lot of schoolwork, quite frankly. My stacks of grading shrunk a bit, but they didn't get entirely done, and in fact have grown. And I have homework for the week after Spring Break to do. And I have that conference paper to churn out that's due right when all my other course papers are due, so I better start at least pushing out a rough draft.

Oh, and I'm going to stop and do some archival work at a big archival library in Chicago on the way to and from break, which I'm going to enjoy tremendously (my inner nerd is quite happy).

Ah well, at least I'll be in another state and able to hang out with family and friends between my laptop seclusion periods. And I'll be able to sleep more and take more time for meal-type things. I'm pretty excited about it, really, despite the pile of books and papers and study materials I'll have to haul with me.

Dormant with the Bears...

So in case you were wondering, these past few weeks weren't only time off for me from school and from blogging, but they were also time off from creative writing as well. Actually, they were pretty much time off from all types of writing.

And most of the time, I wasn't even in that mode where I felt like I was collecting writing material. When I did think about my creative writing projects, I felt rather "eh" about them, like all my creative energy and confidence had leaked out my little toe or something, and I wasn't even sure where it had leaked to. I mean, you'd 'a thought there'd have been a puddle of creativity somewhere on the floor, but not so much.

It wasn't pretty. But I think it was necessary. I've been dealing with a lot of stresses of various kinds lately, and I think I needed time off, even from creativity. I'm pretty sure what I was going through was what Virginia Hampton Wright calls a "period of dormancy":

In just about every cycle there's a period of dormancy, when it seems that nothing much is happening. Sometimes this is when you think your well has dried up. You can't imagine ever having another good idea ever again. You're not interested in your work. Creativity doesn't mean as much, or if it means anything, you can't really connect with it. (The Soul Tells a Story p. 206)

Ironically, during my time of dormancy I was in a warm place, and now that I'm back in the cold, I'm feeling energized again. Naturally, now that I'm feeling better, it's back into the swing of a busy semester, which means less time to spend on the creative writing parts. But c'est la vie, eh?

Anyone want to swap dormancy stories?

Day 34: Word Counts Move Slow with Big Words

Thought of the Day, brought on by a conversation the other night with some friends: Word counts add up much slower than pages do when you use big words. I'm noticing this a lot. I have 10 pages written total out of the 45 I have due for this week and next (that's three 15-page papers that are due), and I've been averaging barely over 250 words per page.

That's compared with an average of 350 words per page when I write fiction or creative non-fiction.

Ah, yes...different genres of writing do demand different sets of vocabulary. It does make me realize that my word output of the last month and a half is heftier in page count than I'd been thinking it was. Interesting.

Anyway, I need to plow out approximately another 10 pages today (i.e., 2500 words, it seems), so I'd better get to it soon, but before I go, I just wanted to mention that despite the common cold I've picked up, I'm actually enjoying this part better than I did the last couple of weeks.

The angsty part of the writing process for me is always that chaotic time when you've got these disparate ideas bouncing around in your head but have no idea how they'll come together to form a paper. That time for me is always filled with fears that there will never be a finished product.

Those fears lessen their grip on me, usually, once I actually get a good start on the writing, though. So despite the continuing knots in my back (which will relax once I hand in that final 15-pager), I'm enjoying the process much more now than I did a few weeks ago. Plus, I'm an accumulative learner, so I usually don't truly grasp the entirety of what I've learned in my courses for the semester until just about now, which is part of the enjoyment. I like watching the bits and pieces coalesce into a more unified whole, both in my head and on the paper.

Day 29: (Metaphorically) Out to Dinner with Derrida

Thought of the day: There is great irony in the fact that I feel I have least to offer in the way of amusing others when I'm at my most thoughtful, productive time of the semester. (This is when I've moved past the "slightly crazy but in an amusing stage" into the "truly focused on nothing but the writing I have to do" stage. I have not quite yet reached this latter stage this term, but feel it approaching.)

This doesn't mean that I have nothing to offer, I think, to others, during these times--just that such a large proportion of my attention is funneled into articulating some of what I'm learning in written form before I can articulate it orally to others once again.

It's interesting, I think, that I still catch myself viewing this attention to communicating in written form as a lesser form of communication than conversation with others, at moments like these.

Then again, it's more that when I'm busy being my most productive/creative, that creativity isn't always balanced between the different parts of my life, but put into primarily one kind of outlet. The same problem happens in a different form when all of my time is spent communicating face-to-face and I have no opportunity for written communication.

And these papers I'm writing ARE conversations: they're conversations with everything I've been reading. The fact that I feel myself narrowing in on the items I'm responding to, in order to prepare my written responses, is a reduction of ambient noise much like focusing in on what one's dinner companion is saying rather than listening to what's going on at the table next to yours at the restaurant (while in another circumstance you and your dinner companion might decide to go over and join in).

So yeah, I'm not trying to ignore all of you other bloggers out there at the next table right now by not mentioning you or linking to you in my posts. It's just that I'm mostly paying attention to the scholarly dinner companions whose words I've been reading, and figuring out how to respond to what they've been telling me for several months (in term paper form)....

Day 17: The Usual Panic Sets In

So, after all the lovely determination I had going on Monday, the usual panic for this time of the semester set in yesterday. That is, I slipped straight past sane, let's-take-this-one-step-at-a-time into ARGHH! How will it all get done in three weeks????

Yup, 'tis edging up on mid-December, folks. Welcome to the end-of-term mood swings leading to a slight insanity (pairs nicely with a glass of merlot). I'm mostly wishing right now that the publishing world of the day hadn't forced poor Wilkie Collins to make his mystery story three-volume-novel length--I'm only about 40% through the 513-page book. Love the story, but there are moments...

At this point, all I'm promising is that by December 19 (which happens to be when the last paper's due), I will have at least another 17,500 new words written and a bunch of revised pages, because that's what's going to have to happen to finish these papers I have due plus all the other assignments I have coming up.

I'm in fact thinking that to preserve the small nicely formed bits of my sanity still lying around (preserve it like pickled herring, but different), I should shift my goal to be 35,000 total words in the period stretching from Nov. 1 to that date, rather than trying to pressure myself to reach the 25,000 by Dec. 1.

The thing is, it's better for me to panic now than to leave the stuff any later. The problem is, a resistant part of me KNOWS that I'm trying to move my panic earlier to get better results, and is seeking to subvert that move by decreasing the urgency... That side must be beaten down.