Something I thought about:
- Revision — this past week marked the switch from poetry to short stories in my creative writing course, and we spent the session looking at manuscript drafts and editorial correspondence. Most students have never seen either before, so it’s always interesting to share a bit of the reality of professional writing and to debunk the notion of a solitary genius.
Something I did:
- November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and while it works really well for some people, I’m not a 50K words in a month kind of person. During the last academic writers group meeting, someone mentioned AcaWriMo, which is basically the academic writers' equivalent. They don’t expect 50K words, of course, but the idea is to dedicate the month to writing, to state goals, and to try to meet them. For me, I’m doing DailyDiss — every day I’m doing some work on my diss. I’m not aiming for specific word counts or anything — the idea is to keep it active and moving every day, even if it’s just a little bit. And so far I’ve managed it. I haven’t had a high word count, but I’ve been working through some central ideas and trying to get them as precise as possible — hard work with a lot of shaping/refinement.
- Got a flu shot.
- Took a lot of photos.
- Celebrated Diwali.
Something I read:
- “Contradictory Classicists: Frank Bidart and Louise Glück” by Rosanna Warren
- “Victoria Chang on the real questions that power stories.”
“…there’s a distinction between the subject of the work and the object of the work; Cézanne’s fruit isn’t about fruit but about perception…”
“The apples can certainly stay in the writing, but their significance may diminish, for once the apples have served their purpose as the triggering object, only then might the real subject(s) appear.”
