(no subject)

[gwynhefar]

It is amazing, sometimes, how the words of others reach to us exactly when we need them, spelling out thoughts we could not name before, and thought they were ours alone. I am not one page into a literary essay assigned for Tuesday when I find exactly my own thoughts staring at me from the page. I must respect an author who begins her essay with the narrative of how difficult it was to write the essay, the present tense allowing her to express her inability in the exact same moment that she is proving her ability -- for we are reading the essay she could not write.

"They [her notes, snatches of thoughts] are here on this desk, and I see their connections but cannot write them into a meaning I trust. The old methods of written discourse trouble me in ways they once did not, and now my thoughts refuse to rest in the well-worn forms of scholarly argument. I am no longer a thinker willing or even able to streamline thought, for every time I attempt it, I see falsification."

This paper feels like that to me. I have notes, I have passages underlined, fragments of sentences with arrows pointing to connections I see in my head but cannot express on the screen. My mind is a flow chart, but such is not the nature of an essay in literary criticism and the pictures will not become words.

Note to self: Find more criticism written by Sarah Ann Wider. My Amazon wishlist has become monstrous.

Comments

[arlani.livejournal.com]

Sounds very much like my dining table/thesis desk... I can talk for hours on end about what my research is on, but the moment I try to sit down and transfer thoughts to written words, I clam up and struggle for every new line.

Imagine my amazement when I managed a completely fresh 3 pages in a little over 2 hours today!

[gwynraven.livejournal.com]

congrats! That's exactly the kind of trouble I tend to have with my papers. I also got my paper finished today, finally. For a dinky little 6 1/2 page essay it took me *forever* to turn my thoughts into words.