The creative process (and blood!)

First things first: I gave blood today (Wednesday) for the first time! Duncan was doing it and my schedule was the same as his so I figured I may as well. It was kinda cool, in an ow-my-arm-hurts-in-a-weird-sore-way-will-this-needle-come-out-soon-please way. I’ll post a picture within the next couple dozen hours. (It won’t be gross.)

Second things second: I am reflecting upon the creative process. By this, I mean: I am attempting to write an essay. This is the third essay for my English class. It is due tomorrow (to a good approximation, at least – there are some complicated details). I’ve been thinking of things to write about, and referencing the text of the novel I’d like to write my topic on, for several days, and I even emailed my TF with a bunch of the ideas I’d collected. So, armed with a whole bunch of jotted-down observations, the page numbers referencing my favorite quotes, and a very vague idea of what my thesis might sort of be, I sat down four hours ago ready to write my essay.

This was a bad idea.

I know this because I did essentially the same thing for my first essay. I never really finished it, because I wasn’t able to write anything. I didn’t have a solid idea of exactly what I was going to do when I jumped into writing it, and as a result I sat staring at the mostly-blank text document for literal hours. The smallest temptations become irresistible distractions when you’re a little sleepy (or perhaps just caffeine-jittery) and don’t know really what you’re writing about. But when you’ve set out to write your essay and then go to sleep and then turn the essay in as soon as you wake up, it seems like the only good idea is to just write – there’s no time to stop and go back and outline your thoughts in detail! So you press on, but those distractions just get bigger.

My first essay ended up a half-minimum-length chimaera of sloppy thesis-like ideas and shaky plot summary, neither of which count as interesting reading or adequate literary analysis, and I was awarded a C (which, here, may as well be a “gentleman’s F”) for my futile efforts. I vowed, then, to figure out how the hell this essay-writing process is properly done, and to do a good job on my second essay.

To my surprise, it worked. What did I do differently? Well, I started making close observations of interesting themes in the text about three weeks before my paper was due, and I shared my ideas with my professor and TF at this early stage. Then I started asking how I could piece together my observations into a literary thesis: something more than “oh look I think characters X and Y actually represent Z” but even further “they represent Z to help illustrate the author’s ideas on Q”. It is difficult to take assorted observations and figure out how to support argument Q. So, when I had about a week and a half left to write my essay, I mentioned this specific difficulty I was having to my professor and TF, and they helped me out even more. But you don’t get answers for free – you have to sit down and think things through to get to them.

So in the days before the essay was due, I settled on the specific ideas and passages that I thought most interesting, copied lots of quotes from those areas into a word document, and then never looked back at the text. I sat down for a long time in a library wondering how I could synthesize my quotes and ideas into an “argument Q”. And eventually, it happened.

The day before the essay was due, my thoughts became even clearer, and I was able to sit down with my computer and churn out about a page per hour. Then my essay was about finished (at about 6AM), I was tired and sleepy and went to bed, and then turned in my essay. The moral of the story is, I spent about as much (or more) time thinking and jotting about what to write than I actually spent in front of my essay’s word document. I did not do that for my current essay, because I felt like “hey it’s due tomorrow and so I don’t have the luxury of being thorough and careful with my ideas”, and thus spent the last four hours spinning my wheels (generating “more heat than light”).

I am sore and sad that I invested so much time into this endeavor, but at the moment I shall go to sleep and wake up in 3ish hours and drink a red bull and then do those things that I learned I need to do in order to write a good paper. It’s not a particularly great situation but I think that I’ll make it out alive. Thanks readers, good night, sorry for the slight nonsensicalness (and in fact I’ll probably look back at this in a few days/months/years and think “what a dumb thing to write about”) and oh man I am sleepy I’d better get to bed.