Thursday, October 25, 2007

The Writing Process

Have you ever noticed how hard the writing process is? It's incredibly difficult--you start out with an idea, find lots and lots of sources and textual evidence to support it, then put it all together in some sort of coherent (and long!) piece of writing. You have to pay attention to tone, style, format; you have to make sure you support your assertions with (sound) evidence, reasoning, and logic.

At the same time, however, writing can flow. It's not all hard work: sometimes you sit down and start working, then three hours later, you have added several pages and have a significant sense of accomplishment.

Mostly it's hard work, though.

Right now, I'm on page eighteen of my paper on The Monk by Matthew Lewis. I've hopefully said something vaguely original, I attacked a critic (because she was wrong). I'm trying to decide if that's out of place in the paper--it's easy to pick on one person specifically to better enunciate my own stance, but I'm afraid it might be a bit jarring with the rest of the paper.

It's due tomorrow. I've been working on it since the start of the semester, but it's the final push until it's done!

1 comment:

PossumCrepes said...

Kerry and I have started teaching a class in Second Life. Writing there brings a new list of challenges. I am used to having the time to construct things well and provide them with formidable support frames. Now, it's all about speed, baby...all about speed.