Sunday, December 7, 2008
This IS Hard.
I wish I had some words of wisdom to drop into the pool, but I'm stuck. In fact, I'm crashing. My brain is suddenly empty; I've never read a thing in my life; I have no idea what I am doing here. Seriously. I have to write a paper, and I am drawing a blank. I keep trying to go back to the days when I'd think of a topic and begin exploring it. I have no idea how I did that. In fact, looking over essays I wrote just a couple of months ago, I'm perplexed. I don't recognize any of the ideas. I'm beginning to panic. I think this is a block, and I'm not sure I've ever experienced a real-life, god-forsaken block. I'm in trouble. I will think about what I would say to you, GEW, and hopefully I'll come up with something over the next day or two. Ack!
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2 comments:
I've never had a real honest-to-goodness block either (at least, not one associated with any deadline), but everything I've read says 1) Don't panic, and 2) Write through it.
I did have a really, really bad semester during PhD classes, took incompletes in both my classes, and then turned in pretty poor essays for both of them. I got the worst grades I'd had since undergrad, but my professors knew from my class input that the papers just turned out crappy. Both ended up being areas advisors. And I'll still end up with a PhD in the end, despite those papers.
A friend who had writer's block all through her MFA in poetry writing passed on her advisor's advice: You don't have to do your best work in grad school. You should do the best work you can at the time, but if the best work of your life is in grad school, that's a pretty sad state of affairs. You're in grad school to learn anyway, not just crank out perfect poems (or papers).
So hang in there! Breathe. Relax. You'll make it.
Thinking of you, Safiak! And since I'm a bit blocked today, and since I have to take the kids to the dentist, go to my own dentist, and since I have a lot of things to do to prep for Christmas, I'm scrapping today as a work day and will make a bash at the diss tomorrow! And I've just been trying to writing through my "blanks," even though it's leading to low quality work. Sigh.
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