When keeping it simple goes wrong.

May 2005: In the greatest triumph of my paper-writing career, I chugged out a paper on Berkeley and Kant by working on it--start to finish--for nine hours in a row. It was a good paper (I earned an A and a note about the careful exegesis of Kant's first critique), and a feat of academic attention unsurpassed even by college standards (and a near-constant pacification by KUVO's May membership drive). It even beat the time I wrote two 25 pagers for Dr. Terry Schmidt in the space of 36 hours. Too bad none of that is kicking in right now. I'm writing a term paper for my Film Theory class (or, more accurately, I'm currently procrastinating on said paper by blogging), and it just works out that I have so much material that I don't quite know where or how to start this paper. AV says wisely, "Start with the first thing." But even my take on the first thing is clumsy.

In my later academic life, I'm in principle undaunted by the idea of writing 10-12 pages. It's the in practice--i.e., the actual doing of the writing--that has me stuck. Tricky how that works. I'm not sure that what I'm feeling right now qualifies as a case of writer's block. Maybe it's just writer's overwhelmence.

When it comes to writing I generally adopt the perspective that the writing "happens when it happens," and that forcing the idea to fruition just doesn't work. Additionally, I no longer pull all-nighters. Artificial deadlines and pressure I've managed to produce myself are my way of fighting the tendency to wait until the very last minute to start something, but if today's any evidence, this tactic doesn't work so well. (And the question does arise: when does "waiting the idea out" turn into avoiding work?)

One interesting challenge presented by this paper in particular, is the stretch I've made with the overall idea. I'm pretty sure that my Master's Thesis for this program will incorporate the main idea this paper will generate, and I've already thought of the potential approaches and modifications to the central idea my work in next semester's Introduction to Phenomenology class will generate. That is exciting--a multivalent analysis of a single problem or issue--and the excitement of interdisciplinary work (which I had, until very recently, forgotten). I'm so excited about the paper I've not yet written that I can't write the paper. How is that for a nerd problem?