on paper-writing and school nights

It’s Sunday afternoon and my mind is all fogged up from too-much-dancing-and-not-enough-sleeping last night (I apparently have yet to learn that the grad student’s weekend is not the same as the working person’s weekend, and act accordingly).  I am supposed to be writing my first paper, a four page memo recommending a political strategy to an Oregon governor from the early 1990s.  Instead, I am procrastinating.  Ah yes, the last three weeks of doing my homework three days ahead of time have now given way to the reality of avoidance-at-all-cost.  (This is hyperbole.  My paper is not due until Thursday.  And to be perfectly frank, I don’t even have the write the paper for Thursday.  I could write another paper next week, or another paper the week after that.  So my self-portrait of a procrastinating student is somewhat misleading.)

So what has public policy grad school been like so far?  I have learned a lot of things I do not entirely believe about the rational behavior of individuals in a market setting.  I have spent a lot of time on my couch (reading).  I have started to make friends.  (My little sister just started middle school, which is similar, I think, to starting graduate school.  At the end of her first week she said, “I have one friend, and everyone else is just an acquaintance.”  I think I have two, maybe three, at the end of three weeks.  Can we extrapolate a rate from our sample of two?  Is the rate of friend-making a straight line, or does it eventually become asymptotic to some physical limit of human friendship?)

Consider for a moment, how scattered this blog entry is, and then imagine me trying to write a very structured, very concise memo about anything.  No more dancing for me (though it was fabulous, the gay boys and the girls in short dresses and the drag queens, and the music, and everyone having such a good time).  Every night is a school night now.

It’s a new world

Dear blog,

I decided to give you a ridiculously long name full of a lot of “p” words.  Why “p” you may ask?  Well, it starts both “public” and “policy” which are the two words that make up the name of the discipline I will soon be studying.  Other good words that start with “p” that I did not use include: picnic, post, pillory, puntilious, pugilistic, and plucky.

As you may have guessed, the creation of this new name signals other changes.  First of all, I’m going to try and write in you.  I know that sounds dirty, but I think it will be a good thing.  Second, since I am no longer campaigning, I am not going to be writing about the Obama campaign anymore.  Instead, I will try to focus on the experience of being a graduate student.  I will also be cross-posting wonky policy stuff with a blog run by students at the program I will be attending (the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, known hereafter as GSPP).  I may also be entertaining a request from a dear friend to include a serial novel.  However, I make no promises on that front; that may be beyond my powers at this time.

Love,

Felicity

thought space

As I’ve started writing fiction again (not that I’ve had time in the last week) I’ve noticed that the shift from not-writing to writing isn’t really about having time to sit down at my computer.  Of course that is a prerequisite; no time to write means no writing.  But there have been plenty of periods in my life (top example: the entire month of August) when I had lots of time and couldn’t bring myself to write a word.

What I realized (consciously) in the last few days is that 80% of the time I write, I already know what I’m going to say (for instance, I wrote most of this post in my head yesterday morning on the trolley).  Not every word, not every sentence, not the beginning and the end of the scene, but something.  I have had a thought, a spark, and spent some time playing it out in my mind.  I do this primarily at night after I turn the light out, before I fall asleep, though also when I am walking somewhere, when I am cooking, when I am sitting on the trolley on the way to work – whenever my body is engaged in something that leaves my mind free to wander.  I need those thought spaces (for lack of a better phrase) to write.  (I have frequently had minor insomnia because some part of me never wants to go to sleep; lying down in the dark is my most creative time, because there are no distractions, and I don’t want to give that up by drifting off into oblivion.)

Of course I don’t always use those spaces for mental composition.  Often I am distracted by more immediate concerns; I think about work, what I am reading, grad school applications, my plans for the future, or recent events in my life.

Or, I don’t use my random thought space to write because I am thinking about a relationship.  For instance, last August.  Also, July.  I found myself, over the summer, engaged in an unexpectedly intense relationship, and whether because of its unexpectedness, its intensity, the fact that it was ending pretty much as soon as it was beginning (due to my imminent departure from San Francisco), or just because it was a relationship, I spent a lot of time thinking about it.  More time than I would have liked, for a lot of reasons.

Not the least of these reasons is that I couldn’t write while it was going on and for a while after it ended.  I’m sure part of that was a pure time issue; even though I had a lot of free days in July, I did not have many free nights, and night is often my best time for writing.  There’s also the issue I discussed before of finding the right voice for the story I am working on; trying to write in the third person made it harder for me to work.  But it is pretty clear to me now, from a slightly removed perspective, that the real issue was that when I lay down to sleep, or when I was walking to catch the bus, or when I was chopping vegetables by myself, I wasn’t thinking about my characters and their interactions.  I was thinking about myself and my interactions with the person I was dating (or had been dating, after we broke up).  I think this is pretty standard, for me; in previous relationships I have also thought a lot about the other person, and myself, and what was going on between us.  I think it’s pretty standard, in general.  Certainly I have talked to a lot of friends over the years who seemed a tad obsessive about their current relationship.  (I suspect it is hormonal.)

My question, now that I’ve put all this together, is: can I have relationships and be a writer too?  I suspect this kind of mental obsession with one’s object of affection fades after a while, reopening thought space for creative endeavors.  I admit I have not been in a relationship long enough to get to that point, so I haven’t tested the hypothesis.  I need to throw another kink in: I thrive on emotional intimacy, and when I don’t have it in real life I create it in stories or find it in books.  Throughout my life I’ve coped with failed real world relationships by finding emotional fulfillment in stories.  So I wonder, too, if my inability to write when in a relationship is a sign that I have less need for fictional intimacy.  In that sense, maybe it’s a good thing.  Maybe it’s better to live in the real world, to connect with real people outside of myself, rather than focusing inward, creating an illusion of life.

noveling!

I spent the last couple hours writing – not blog-writing, or work-writing, writing.  It feels wonderful.

One of the upsides to being sick is that a few of those hours I spent literally doing nothing – too tired to read, too tired to stare at my computer screen, but too anxious to actually sleep – I was thinking about my novel.  (The rest of them I spent planning out my life as an invalid.)  Last week, inspired by several wonderful first-person novels I have read recently, I tried writing my novel in the first person.  This has been going swimmingly, and I wonder why I did not do try this before; one of the appeals of my current project is that I dearly love my protagonist, and despite the fact that she is an fictional Edwardian heiress, strongly identify with her.  (As background, my novel steals characters from a semi-famous children’s book and imagines them grown up, with all the complications that entails.)  As a child she was my favorite character, and I identified with her completely, and so in writing a grown-up version (or a 20 year-old version, whether that is grown-up or not) I am borrowing heavily from myself.  It’s like a game of, If I Were an Edwardian Heiress, What Would I Do? (Does anyone else play that game?  Just me?)

Beyond the identification consideration though, I think it’s interesting how much more quickly and easily my writing flows when I write in the first person.  My thesis project was told from the POV of a girl who was in my ways my polar opposite – totally lacking in empathy for anyone around her except her father (not to say I am always empathetic, but I think if I err on either side of normal human interaction, it is on the side of considering other people’s feelings, sometimes to the point of paralysis).  There were certain things we had in common I’m sure – I grew to identify with her because I was writing from her perspective – but I would not say that Eve was me.  But, similar to this case, I struggled for months to find a consistent and compelling third-person narrative voice, before trying to tell the story from Eve’s point of view, and feeling like I was finally getting somewhere.

Maybe the first person is just easier.  It doesn’t require the same delicate balancing between internal and external.  (Which isn’t to say it doesn’t require any balancing… to tell a story in the first-person requires some finagling, some explanation of why this voice is telling this story which can easily become clunky and distracting.)  Maybe it’s just easier for me – never having written from anyone else’s head, I don’t know what works for other people.  I’m also not sure, at this point in my development as a writer, if this is something I should just accept, or something I should struggle with.  Are there things I want to do with this story that I can’t do in a first-person voice?  Very possibly.  But if I insist on a third-person narrator, will I ever write more than snippets here and there?  Maybe not.

For now, if it’s flowing, I’ll let it flow, and follow it down and down the (first-person) path it wants to follow.  But someday I really want to write something with a noisy Victorian narrator making intrusive comments.