March - getting into it

I’m still really enjoying it but I’m starting to get the sense that this is a marathon not a sprint, and maybe I’ve gone off at a slightly too fast pace. This week in particular, I’ve been getting a stitch: quite a lot of full time work on, plus a child who has been sick all week, a gym schedule I’m supposed to be keeping to, friends to see, a house to sell, a new house to buy... it’s felt like reading and thinking about writing is taking a back seat. 

What have I done this month on the course? Well, I’ve got a real kick out of exploring secondary material because I’m a geek. I just am. I found a book called ‘Swimming in a pond in the rain’ by George Saunders, and dove right in. It’s a radical teaching text about Russian short stories, breaking down their techniques, and it’s amazing. I don’t even have any knowledge of Russian writers...I’ve been note taking like a dervish and trying to keep up with the ideas I keep discovering, about how to draw characters, scenes, and how to always keep escalating. 

At the same time, I’m writing away for an hour or two at a time on a Wednesday afternoon, and I’ve got a little further into my book. I’m happy with a lot of it, which is really saying something. It’s been an enlightening experience. I’m learning a lot about writing from reading, about what I like, what I don’t like, what works, what feels lazy and I think that’s the point. Being able to go from identifying that into putting it into action is not easy and I think it does need more time to sink into my subconscious to do that. I’m not forcing it, just trying to be playful with it. I’d love to write more but that’s not an option at the moment.

There’s one paper due this term, on any title or subject that we like, and I’m going to be putting that together next month. I plan to write something about texts in dialogue with each other and themselves because I want to look at something structural and conceptual. It’s my first paper and I’m not 100% sure about how to go about it – I haven’t written an academic essay for over 20 years – so I’ll take advantage of the teaching time available and make sure I chat to my tutor about it before I begin. But I’m also fighting a few things on all fronts – lots of deadlines for my daily work, an upswelling of projects I really want to do, and still more books to read... so life has just got a bit harder. 

Tonight we have a class on writing about climate which I feel both interested in and a bit cynical about. Interested to see how it pans out...