Already I've fallen off the wagon on my 30-day blog-a-thon. I'm going to try to double up today, but it'll be difficult. We've got a road trip planned. Perhaps I can allow room for one day away from the blog each week. During grad school I always gave myself a day off.
That's not true, actually. When I realized, suddenly in November, that I only had six months left to write the thesis, I panicked. It sounds utterly ridiculous, doesn't it? Six months and you panicked? You freak of nature. I know. And I am a freak of nature. But recall, if you'll permit me some slack, that I have OCD (without the C) and an anxiety disorder, and those voices are far louder than those of reason.
But at the same time, I don't think I can possibly be the only thesis-writer to have sat up on Thankgiving night and said, "Holy shit, I have to turn this thing in six months from now! I'll never get it done." When I started the thesis in early August on my own, before the semester had started, I felt like I had plenty of time. The better part of a year. And it was only required to be 125 pages, and I had one solid essay written and chunks of others that would eventually morph into thesis components. But once I started assembling these bits, and writing more bits, word by agonizing word, I realized why it takes people years to write a book.
Writing is hard. It's tedious. And there are many, many days when the words just aren't coming. Now, in "real" life, when you're writing a book on your own terms, you can say, "Eh, today's not my day," and piddle around or just abandon the effort altogether. It doesn't make for writerly discipline, of course. It's frowned upon by uber-hard workers and the super prolific. And I can make the argument that even if you're writing garbage, at least you're writing, and that from the pile of crap you produce you may just dig up a diamond. (By that I mean a single decent sentence out of 4 shitty pages, or a salient idea worth pursuing.) In school, however, there's a deadline. You've got to write. If you write crap today, you damn well better not write crap tomorrow, because there are only so many tomorrows in a semester. The point is to get it done, and to do so largely on your own. Nobody pushes you in grad school; they just expect results on the appointed date.
One of the most valuable things I learned about myself in the last two years is that I function really well with a deadline. I'd never have thought that about myself, but it turns out that when I have no expectations placed upon me, I just fart around and dally in the daffodils and dream half-assed writer dreams that never come to fruition. This is possibly the most important thing I could have learned about myself with regards to a future career. I will never get anything done unless someone is expecting work by a certain date. Doesn't matter who. I just need a date by which a piece of writing must be ready, and then I'll be efficient and studious and hard-working. I need a second entity in my writing life, someone who's waiting for me to write. I alone am not enough to push myself to success.
That seems kind of wimpy, kind of weak. Perhaps, but it's what I know to be true. It's how and who I am. And I'm so glad I learned it.
When I realized I only had six months, I panicked. And I think plenty of thesis students have done this. Writing a book-length work in under a year is impossible, really. No thesis is book-ready. I could edit and rewrite mine for another year, and I fully expect to, for more than a year. And sadly, the manuscript will no longer be the laser focus of my existence. (Damn kids, always needing food.) It'll be a side project, one that gets my attention when I have time, when the stars align properly. That's a huge bummer, and a huge relief. The thesis and I need some time away from each other. I'm happy to devote myself to the pieces individually, but as a whole, it's starting to feel like a houseguest that won't leave and has been feeding my dogs table scraps and teaching my kids obscene gestures.
With that said, I'll cut this blog shorter than I'd like to (I can do that because nobody is reading it or checking it or expecting it) and go rouse my menfolk. We have moutains to find today!
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