Alternate titles for this post include Guilt-Driven Post About Writing and The Hiatus is Over, I Swear.
Collegiate Hypocrisy and A is for Almost cordially welcome you to 2014 (better late than never).
I graduate from college in four months, need a job in five, tie the knot in six, and have a senior thesis project about the mental health status of Latinos in the US due in April, and I AM NOT FEELING STRESSED AT ALL!
Oh yeah, I also decided to write a memoir draft / series of personal essays for my writing capstone. Memoir! Personal essays! Creative writing all day, every day! Woohoo!
Spoiler: I'm not as pumped as the previous paragraph suggests. BUT, I did crank out the first part of my project yesterday, and that's what I'm sharing with you today. It turns out that I thrive on an incentive system, and putting the first chunk on the blog is jam-packed with incentives.
For one thing, publishing it on here will almost certainly guilt me into finishing it. Hopefully. Guilt's a good driving force for me. Also, on the off chance that you like it, I win the incentive of an audience that will read my work of their own will. Who knows--you might even check up on the other pages of Collegiate Hypocrisy more often, which gives J and Z more incentives to contribute! Everyone wins.
Without further ado, the first part of Still Untitled Series of Ally's Personal Writing Project.
Collegiate Hypocrisy and A is for Almost cordially welcome you to 2014 (better late than never).
I graduate from college in four months, need a job in five, tie the knot in six, and have a senior thesis project about the mental health status of Latinos in the US due in April, and I AM NOT FEELING STRESSED AT ALL!
Oh yeah, I also decided to write a memoir draft / series of personal essays for my writing capstone. Memoir! Personal essays! Creative writing all day, every day! Woohoo!
Spoiler: I'm not as pumped as the previous paragraph suggests. BUT, I did crank out the first part of my project yesterday, and that's what I'm sharing with you today. It turns out that I thrive on an incentive system, and putting the first chunk on the blog is jam-packed with incentives.
For one thing, publishing it on here will almost certainly guilt me into finishing it. Hopefully. Guilt's a good driving force for me. Also, on the off chance that you like it, I win the incentive of an audience that will read my work of their own will. Who knows--you might even check up on the other pages of Collegiate Hypocrisy more often, which gives J and Z more incentives to contribute! Everyone wins.
Without further ado, the first part of Still Untitled Series of Ally's Personal Writing Project.
Better Late Than Never
It is 10:51 pm. Since sitting down to write, I have read forty pages of someone else’s memoir, gone to the bathroom twice, edited a cover letter, and rooted around online research databases for a missing citation. You don’t know me very well yet, but turning to research homework before writing is a sign of ultimate desperation. Now it’s 11:02 pm. Better late than never.
Better late than never works for writers. Unlike lawyers, improv performers, and the NYC Bomb Squad, writers can get away with better late than never. In order to write well, you need to read a lot and write a lot—most authors agree on this. I think you need to read, write, and do interesting things (or at least talk to people who do interesting things). You’ll never know how to write an awful date scene well if you’ve never had an awful date. You’ll never know how to describe a forest if you never go hiking, spend a weekend camping, or form an intimate relationship with the National Geographic channel. So the way I see it, better late than never is a writer’s most solid excuse, because of course we’d have written earlier…if we weren't off adventuring (or doing the crossword/dozing/going to the bathroom for the second time in twenty minutes).
If you really, really want to be a prolific writer, set a block of time aside every day For Writing Purposes Only. Anne Lamott mentions this tactic in her book Bird by Bird, and I have no doubt that other writers before and after her have mentioned it as well. If you do it long enough—if you dial down the volume of the world and turn the wifi on your laptop off in order to focus solely on your writing—it’ll become habit. That chunk of time, be it ten minutes or two hours, will lodge itself in your brain as a preordained important event, like lunchtime or happy hour or the time when M*A*S*H reruns start on the Hallmark Channel.
I started writing when I was ten. I wrote creative fiction with as much creativity as a Disney-soaked suburban fourth-grader could muster. Until I entered the eighth grade, I wrote for fun as often as I rode my bike, watched cartoons, or antagonized my siblings for fun. Then, at age fourteen, hormones and elementary school graduation had a weird effect on me and a weird(er) effect on my writing.
I approached high school not as if I were one teenage girl headed to an ecosystem that provided equal parts academics, arts, athletics, and social binge drinking. Rather, I assumed that the first day of freshman year was the first day of my adult life. I was straight-faced, serious, and probably would’ve made a great Puritan. Social implications aside, the important thing here is that I put my writing on lockdown. I deemed it insignificant for any successful future and a nervous habit at best. Some people had twitchy legs, and I had an imagination with no off switch. But I couldn’t let my writing take time away from Serious Stuff, so I marginalized it to bedtime and class time.
Classes at St. Dominic High School were not challenging, and I was a smart dork. Also, my teachers didn’t notice the difference between scribbling lecture notes and penning melodramatic, therapeutic fiction, so I wrote all day long. What teacher would ever tell a student to stop writing?
This class writing endured through four years of high school and four years of college. It didn’t matter whether it was tenth-grade world history or senior-year religion class. The more—dry, we’ll say—subjects were my prolific authorial moments. My notebook from Cultural History of Latin America from my second year at Wartburg is a gold mine.
The pros suggested I set aside some time every day, and I did. I wrote when I wouldn’t be wasting time. To any teachers I might have pissed off, I’m sorry. I still participated in your classes (you all gave me good marks for effort, at least), and I still got As. You could’ve docked me points if you wanted to, and you didn’t. If the principle of the matter still irks you, be consoled by the fact that even though I survived your courses with no scratches on the record, I did earn two Cs in college. And they were both for my creative writing classes. Revenge is best served with a fine, ironic glaze.
At any rate, I am not good at prioritizing my writing. It’s a struggle for me to write in my free time, without the white noise of a lecture. I get jittery at my desk and feel an irrepressible urge to play Minesweeper. When I know I really need to write, I go to an empty classroom in the English building, and the blank austerity of the blackboards can goad a few sentences out of me. If the classrooms are full, I sit on a wooden bench outside the English professors’ offices. It’s supposed to be a purgatory spot for students awaiting academic conferences—if nothing else, the sheer discomfort of the narrow-slatted wood insists a brief wait time. I break the vibe by spending forty-five minute stretches there to write a reflection or creative piece.
It could be that the bench is baby step out of the classroom and into real-world writing. For starters, I don’t have to surround myself with the streaky windows and muted carpet inherent in a classroom. At the same time, the purgatory bench still lets me believe that I’m not there to write, but only waiting until my advisor is available for a chat…and yet I return to that bench every day.
It is my hope that if you want to write, you can set a little time aside every day. It is also my hope that you will physically be able to write anytime, anywhere. I hope you can write without the urge to check your email or transplant your ass to an uncomfortable bench that will leave slat marks on your cheeks when you stand up to leave.
Better late than never works for writers. Unlike lawyers, improv performers, and the NYC Bomb Squad, writers can get away with better late than never. In order to write well, you need to read a lot and write a lot—most authors agree on this. I think you need to read, write, and do interesting things (or at least talk to people who do interesting things). You’ll never know how to write an awful date scene well if you’ve never had an awful date. You’ll never know how to describe a forest if you never go hiking, spend a weekend camping, or form an intimate relationship with the National Geographic channel. So the way I see it, better late than never is a writer’s most solid excuse, because of course we’d have written earlier…if we weren't off adventuring (or doing the crossword/dozing/going to the bathroom for the second time in twenty minutes).
If you really, really want to be a prolific writer, set a block of time aside every day For Writing Purposes Only. Anne Lamott mentions this tactic in her book Bird by Bird, and I have no doubt that other writers before and after her have mentioned it as well. If you do it long enough—if you dial down the volume of the world and turn the wifi on your laptop off in order to focus solely on your writing—it’ll become habit. That chunk of time, be it ten minutes or two hours, will lodge itself in your brain as a preordained important event, like lunchtime or happy hour or the time when M*A*S*H reruns start on the Hallmark Channel.
I started writing when I was ten. I wrote creative fiction with as much creativity as a Disney-soaked suburban fourth-grader could muster. Until I entered the eighth grade, I wrote for fun as often as I rode my bike, watched cartoons, or antagonized my siblings for fun. Then, at age fourteen, hormones and elementary school graduation had a weird effect on me and a weird(er) effect on my writing.
I approached high school not as if I were one teenage girl headed to an ecosystem that provided equal parts academics, arts, athletics, and social binge drinking. Rather, I assumed that the first day of freshman year was the first day of my adult life. I was straight-faced, serious, and probably would’ve made a great Puritan. Social implications aside, the important thing here is that I put my writing on lockdown. I deemed it insignificant for any successful future and a nervous habit at best. Some people had twitchy legs, and I had an imagination with no off switch. But I couldn’t let my writing take time away from Serious Stuff, so I marginalized it to bedtime and class time.
Classes at St. Dominic High School were not challenging, and I was a smart dork. Also, my teachers didn’t notice the difference between scribbling lecture notes and penning melodramatic, therapeutic fiction, so I wrote all day long. What teacher would ever tell a student to stop writing?
This class writing endured through four years of high school and four years of college. It didn’t matter whether it was tenth-grade world history or senior-year religion class. The more—dry, we’ll say—subjects were my prolific authorial moments. My notebook from Cultural History of Latin America from my second year at Wartburg is a gold mine.
The pros suggested I set aside some time every day, and I did. I wrote when I wouldn’t be wasting time. To any teachers I might have pissed off, I’m sorry. I still participated in your classes (you all gave me good marks for effort, at least), and I still got As. You could’ve docked me points if you wanted to, and you didn’t. If the principle of the matter still irks you, be consoled by the fact that even though I survived your courses with no scratches on the record, I did earn two Cs in college. And they were both for my creative writing classes. Revenge is best served with a fine, ironic glaze.
At any rate, I am not good at prioritizing my writing. It’s a struggle for me to write in my free time, without the white noise of a lecture. I get jittery at my desk and feel an irrepressible urge to play Minesweeper. When I know I really need to write, I go to an empty classroom in the English building, and the blank austerity of the blackboards can goad a few sentences out of me. If the classrooms are full, I sit on a wooden bench outside the English professors’ offices. It’s supposed to be a purgatory spot for students awaiting academic conferences—if nothing else, the sheer discomfort of the narrow-slatted wood insists a brief wait time. I break the vibe by spending forty-five minute stretches there to write a reflection or creative piece.
It could be that the bench is baby step out of the classroom and into real-world writing. For starters, I don’t have to surround myself with the streaky windows and muted carpet inherent in a classroom. At the same time, the purgatory bench still lets me believe that I’m not there to write, but only waiting until my advisor is available for a chat…and yet I return to that bench every day.
It is my hope that if you want to write, you can set a little time aside every day. It is also my hope that you will physically be able to write anytime, anywhere. I hope you can write without the urge to check your email or transplant your ass to an uncomfortable bench that will leave slat marks on your cheeks when you stand up to leave.