Writing Habits


Wherein Our Heroine Examines the Act While Doing It.
Thanks to Rana, who is an ever-fertile source of topical ideas. She's been writing recently about procrastination and writing habits. I hadn't thought about it before, but my writing habits vary wildly based on what it is I am writing.

Every writing endeavor in school started with the best of intentions - outlines, a thesis, etc. Then things would tend to go horribly wrong. Mostly this occurred when I was dealing with a too-tidy idea and less-than-tidy real life. For example: my Independent Writing Project (basically my law school "thesis" - required for graduation) started with a really nifty, tidy theme. My topic was Federal Civil Forfeiture in the Supreme Court. I knew that the most recent cases mostly dealt with drug dealers and the earliest ones dealt with high-seas piracy. I tried to weave "piracy" as a theme through the paper (thinking that drug dealers are, in some ways, the pirates of the modern age). This idea completely fell apart in the middle. It was too tidy - it did not cover the Civil War era, where the Supremes erratically (though interestingly) juggled the status of forfeiture defendants between enemy soldiers and treasonous citizens (yes, Virginia, history does repeat itself).

The other odd fact about writing that paper was that I wrote the first draft longhand ("Odd?" you say. "Yes, odd." I reply. I am the woman who uses a computer for everything. Ask me to squish an insect, and I will probably reach for my laptop). The problem was, I was working on an old-fashioned Macintosh 9" screen. It was 1994, and I was still using a computer that was outdated when I got it in 1988. For normal papers, the lack of screen real estate was a small problem. For this project, it was a nightmare, as the footnotes window took up about half the screen. Add to that the fact that I was going back and forth between Portland, Maine and Burlington, Vermont every few weeks or so to visit the man who nine years later would become Our Hero, and I needed something with a bit more portability. I would venture to guess that somewhere in my mother's house there is an old notebook, spiral-bound at the top, feverishly filled with the frantic ravings of a third-year law student holding forth on an arcane subject. Footnotes were delineated by a double-slash, right in the middle of the text. It was clumsy, but it worked.

Possibly my most unlovely academic writing phenomena were the occasional hissy-fit tantrums that preceded truly odious writing assignments. I truly hate it when I decide to do something that sounds terribly interesting, only to find out that it is terribly dull. Such was the case with my class in European Community Law. Sounds interesting, eh? You can see the canals of Venice, St. Paul's dome in London, the Tuileries in Paris. Nope. U.S. tax law is more interesting, in my opinion. At any rate, I double-whammied myself by writing the final paper on a topic that I thought would be interesting, but also turned out to be tedious. Artistic expression and censorship - ooh. Sexy. Cultures, knitted together by the EC, only to clash over ideas of artistic merit vs. pornography! I don't remember exactly why I hated writing this paper so much, but I do remember allowing myself to kick my feet and wail, "I don't wanna, I don't wanna, I don't wanna!" before settling down to write. This occurred in the privacy of my own home, mind you.

Now, every morning is the "oh god - must blog" phenomenon. Occasionally, I will have an idea before I get up in the morning - often, not. But I have set myself this task, and I will fulfill it. Partly it is because I have an obligation to people like Tim, and partly it is because I have an obligation to myself. Mostly it is because I may not be in school any longer, but I am still learning.

Posted: Friday - October 22, 2004 at 07:30 AM         | |

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