Holy Crap, Writing is Hard

And why? Why? Why, must it be so? I don't ever remember having this problem in high school, or college, or even law school, but now, suddenly as a graduate student writing is like pulling teeth. It's like that Shoe cartoon where Shoe expresses exactly how I feel. "Writing is easy," he says. "Just sit down at the desk, put a clean piece of paper in the typewriter, and stare at the blank page until beads of blood start to form on your forhead."

Horrible but true. I've tried some ways around it. I'm best when I do some free writing first thing every morning. It creates ideas and connects ideas to other ideas. It also often forms a blueprint for a paper. I can take pieces of different free writing sections and add them to the paper. It helps me think. I think there is also something else to it. It makes the writing process successful and fun. Since none of it gets turned in I can enjoy it and feel good about myself for just sitting there and writing for 10, 20, or 30 minutes. I should go back to that.

But that doesn't help me now. I've got about 75% of a "zero draft" written (the kind of draft that would make sense only to me, but that actually does make some sort of sense to me) and I am having a really hard time getting any more done. The main problem, I think, is "gradunoia" - the strange mental affliction that causes graduate students to be convinced that they have absolutely nothing correct that thay can say. Everything correct is trite; everything interesting is wrong. Jeez. I'm depressing myself just writing about it, but it's not just me. Almost everyone I talked to was a good writer, and enjoyed writing, before we came to graduate school. Come to think of it, maybe its that paranoia that makes academic writing so impossible to read. Even academics are trying to hide their ideas in ugly prose for fear that everything they say is useless. I've gotta find a way around this. I refuse to accept being a writer for a living and having it hurt this much every time I do it.

I may have said this a few times before, but my next paper, I won't do this way. I'm free writing it way ahead of time, because deadlines bring out the pressure that stops creative thought. Hell, its stops all thought. And for this paper I've got a pretty good idea of what I want to say. Very good actually. I'm just so fearful each darn paragraph is either trite or wring that I can hardly get it written. Aaarrrggghh!!!!

Ok. I'm going to take a run at it. I'll let you know how it goes.