Compos Mentis

A Milestone. And Self-indulgence.

(Eds. Note: I've come down with my first cold of the year. It's hit me a little hard, and so most of today I've just been sitting around doing nothing at all. As a matter of fact, I spent most of the last four hours watching three episodes of NCIS and two episodes of Scrubs. Aside from the random coughing and sneezing my head feels like it's in a rather painful fog, so I'm really in no position to be writing anything. On the other hand, yesterday I passed a milestone I'm quite proud of so I think I'm entitled to a little bit of random and pointless elucidation.)

I've never considered myself to be a writer. What I mean is that I never think of myself as being a 'writer'; I differentiate between the kind of writing I'm doing. So, generally, since most of my writing is philosophical, I consider myself a philosopher. Back when I used to write poetry on a regular basis, I was not afraid to call myself a poet, albeit usually one who hastily added that he was a bad poet. I write some history, but not enough that I think of myself as a historian. I write generally essay length scribbles on anything that comes to mind, but I don't think of myself as an essayist - this perhaps because, again, I'd have to come out very quickly and say most of them are very bad essays. There is a trend here that I have caught on to and that has served me well to realize: the fact that I try everything does not necessarily mean that I am good at everything, and that sometimes realizing what one is good at and running with it gets you farther than trying to claim you can successfully do everything.

That doesn't mean I can't admire the people who can. For me, Jean-Paul Sartre is the prototypical writer. He did it all: novels, plays, essays, journalism. And he tended to be good at all of them. Besides, he lived like a writer; and so here I admit that there is a certain difference between the 'artistic' life of a writer and the 'academic' life of a... well, any kind of specialist. This is why Sartre trumps Umberto Eco as a 'writer': because I see Eco fitting in better with academic life, although he too has done it all: novels, essays, research into some rather arcane fields, and surprisingly enough even a couple of children's books (I have yet to find a translation from the Italian, though). I have to admit my preference for Eco's style and intelligence in all cases as well: Name of the Rose and the Island of the Day Before trump Nausea and certainly Theory of Semiotics trumps Being and Nothingness. There are others, too, who manage to blur the distinguishing lines: Tolstoy and Dostoevski (in fact most Russian authors), Victor Hugo, Bertrand Russell (though he never really strayed into fiction, he covered just about everything else).

I wonder how these writers managed to do it - to be good at so many different styles at once, not to mention the amount of head-work going into researching the novels and the non-fiction. I'm also curious about their process. Bertrand Russell wrote that he once tried doing drafts of whatever he was writing, but the subsequent drafts were always worse than what he had written the first time. But being most enamored of Eco's writing, when I found he had gone into some detail in an essay entitled 'How I Write' I went to town. Talking about his novels, he often went years without writing a paragraph; he spent time mapping out the surroundings and characters - drawing them before he figured out their personality and speaking traits.

Now that I've finished a draft of a short story collection - well, let me stop there. It's just a draft. It's not particularly good at the moment. I'm not Bertrand Russell, and I can't just whip out a solid product on the first go. Besides, if anything it's harder to write solid fiction than solid non-fiction. But I've never finished anything this far-reaching before. You just need to look at the three abandoned books I have on my hard drive next to this one to see that. This was ten months of solid work. Umberto Eco put in about six years of solid work before he finished A Name of the Rose. So I'm hoping for something about one seventh as good as that. But right now it's enough that it's going to be finished - this is where I say a very grateful thanks to all of you who have edited, discussed ideas, or simply given me encouragement; I couldn't have gone this far otherwise.

But having come this far I can now look a little closer about how I write. Like Eco (I really shouldn't say that, it'll give me the wrong idea) it takes me a long time to go between having an idea and being able to start writing. But then from there it usually comes out smoothly. I usually do better just sitting down for several hours to get a short story done than to try to write it in chunks. For the most part the same is true for my non-fiction writing, or at least the stuff I get graded on. I'm not sure whether breaking off and coming back to something you are writing is something you can learn to do: but I imagine if it is like the other things I've learned while writing this collection, it's something that takes discipline and patience. There were times when I did not look forward to writing, but the idea was in my head and I stuck it out anyway. There were dry periods where I didn't write anything at all, but I continued to think about and sketch out ideas which eventually seemed fruitful.

The patience involved in this is probably the one thing I would like to take with me - this even if my collection gets completely rejected, if it turns out to be completely horrible. I'm always torn when trying to define 'writer': would someone who wrote as prolificly as Sartre but was completely horrible at it still be a writer? Or one who was as good but didn't publish anything, instead burning the drafts while they were stil warm from being printed? The question is interesting to me in one sense, but in another it doesn't matter. I can't see myself changing anytime soon - I write because I feel compelled to write, about whatever situation or story pops into my head. It can drive me crazy until I can find something to scribble some notes on. Whether or not I ever am successful with my writing really doesn't matter. And I can be optimistic here, too: look at C.S. Peirce, who managed to be the greatest American philosopher in history with only a couple of people realizing until some decades after his death. I'm going to be writing no matter what; in that case, I can say that what really matters is what writing has taught me.

posted by Emmett @ 11:55 1 Comments

(A Little Strange)

I've been trying to distract myself recently. I thought rather naively that senior year would come and I would be able to fall back from school a bit, maybe get a job and maybe have some more time to write and do music. Now, in a sense I was right on the money. My classes this term are pretty easy and don't require much work. But the rest of my life has thrown me some stress: trying to figure out what I'm going to do in the future, how I'm going to do it, and also trying to go through a ton of administrative red tape in transferring the credits I earned in England here. (To be fair, the red tape isn't all that bad. I don't have to fill out too many forms. It's just the people who are difficult.) All of this and a fair amount of stress in my personal life has thrown my original plan out of sync.

What was my response? To throw myself into work even more than I had originally intended. I had the same amount of time to kill, just without the relaxation I had hoped for. So, when my history of modern philosophy teacher assigns readings from, say, Leibnitz, I go out and read two books about Leibnitz so I can understand him better. For a presentation I'm giving in my philosophy seminar, I'm reading all of the published works of Wittgenstein in order to better analyze the four or five pages I was assigned to critique. I've been consistently reading two books outside of assigned reading at any given time, one of which was in Latin and took me far longer than I would have hoped. I'm teaching myself how to play the piano, and am still putting nearly an hour a day into guitar. I'm continuing to learn Greek. I've already read three books for my honors thesis and I've started a fourth.

I'm not sure this was a usual response to stress, but it's been working. Instead of thinking about all of the things which are out out of my hands, all of the things I can't change, I've occupied myself so much with things that I enjoy doing that any work I can do towards, say, graduating or getting into the JET program gets done because I can focus on it as the task at hand.

There are downsides. I can't pay attention to everything at once, so things slip. I've started working on my last short story for the set (mostly by writing in class) but it took me a good month to get an idea going for it from the end of my last one. And I know soon I'll have to start looking into it more, since the deadline is coming up and it takes me a long time to edit things. But other things have dropped too. I remember freshman year on the weekends doing something each night and then staying up until three or four in the morning on a regular basis. Now, if I go to a party, usually I only spend a little while there before I go home and practice Greek before bed. And my non-fiction writing only comes in fits and spurts - I wrote eight pages on consciousness yesterday after having my notebook lay fallow for about three weeks. And of course there is the habitual dropping of writing on my blog.

Of course no coping mechanism is perfect, and even on my good periods stuff doesn't get done that needs to get done. Occasionally I get ahead of the power curve; occasionally I even feel unstressed. But the most important thing that has allowed me to have this kind of focus is something I believe I picked up in England; the idea that this too shall pass. On the good days as well as the bad, I know that the feeling is transistory as well as the situation being transistory. Something will happen and I will have to deal with that. This understanding allows me to push aside, for the moment, any despair or anger that I may have concerning my present situation and to just focus on what needs to get done, even if I'm somewhat artificially creating a need to cope with extreme circumstances. And this sense of release of my emotion in order to get things done may be particularly surprising as it is a sign that I may in fact be grown up.

posted by Emmett @ 14:57 1 Comments