I'm reading a book again on writing about literature, trying to extract what I can then communicate to my composition / literature students as they work on the first drafts of their essays that are due on Monday. As always, I feel like I'm learning what I should have known a month ago, and I wonder if they will wonder why in the hell I didn't tell them any of this a week or two ago. And I think about how I can maybe let them guess that there was some ingenious reason for not telling them these things "too soon," because I wanted them to write in a freer space. I think also that I should have known these things a lot longer than a month ago - how about two years ago, when I was starting my graduate program, or further back than that, when I was always agonizing over what exactly I was supposed to be doing when I wrote about literature? My writing process was mostly what I'd figured out without overt instruction. And I could romanticize that, and think that it's what has helped my writing - that I'm not constrained by formulas, but by my own kinds of logic - but I don't know if that's true. I wonder if a person can only get so far my way. At any rate, I'm excited to try to write a paper myself now, but I don't know when I'll get to one.
It's been nine minutes since I started this, and it's 5:48 am. Luckily, I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't sleep any longer, so I decided to take a shower and then read that book. But that made me want to write, so I gave myself just these thirty minutes to do so. There is never enough time anymore to write, or so I tell myself. It's more that I'm not in the state of mind to write, or I think that I need a few hours at least to sink into anything worth saying. I feel myself always on the surface of everything, not in a frame of mind conducive to deep insights. But who's to say if any of that is true? I tell my students to develop a habit of writing, even 15 or 20 minutes a day - because the writing books say to do this. And maybe our best insights don't depend on having hours of open time. At any rate, I had 30 minutes, and now it's 5:54 am, so I have 14.
But I've been sitting for two minutes now, just listening to the sounds outside, because the door to the back is open, since it's in the 70s out there.
I'm teaching some excerpts from Francisco Jimenez's trilogy today - the trilogy I wrote my master's essay on. A student wrote on Blackboard (our class website) that for some reason, these touched him differently than even the previous readings - that something about the kindness of those who helped Jimenez during his grade school and college years really moved this student. And it made me think about how I too found his trilogy so moving, and how as I wrote my master's essay - and afterward - I wondered if that affection and respect came through. Was there no way in the form for me to communicate that? And if so, why not? I'm not sure about this. Maybe enough of my feeling came through, or at least some. But there is this dilemma - this need to say something scholarly - something significant - and in that demanded form, I struggle to not lose the ability to say what I feel about a piece of writing.
I have 3 minutes left now. This is what these particular 30 minutes of thinking and typing are turning into on the 'page.' 2 minutes now. I waste time reporting these things, but I am thinking about how long it actually takes to write well. Not as long as I tend to think, but longer than what my students think as they wonder why their two hours of pounding out an essay haven't materialized into a well-written piece of work. Writing takes time. I keep telling them that.
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