" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

It’s day 12 of AcBoW­riMo and if you’ve fol­lowed along, you’ll notice the progress bar over there is sloooooowly inch­ing toward my goal — “picome­ter­ing” is more like it. While I have steadily worked on my diss, I have not writ­ten much con­tent. In the first days I wrote up a storm, then I found research holes and my writ­ing is in a hold­ing pat­tern while I research.

Maybe I should think of this as WrEvDaDaMo, that is, Write Every Damn Day Month. I like what Mar­tin Eve had to say about AcBoW­riMo. As a per­son on the receiv­ing end of the rush to fin­ish from my dis­ser­ta­tion advi­sor, the whole fin­ish a book/dissertation by the end of the month holds the poten­tial to feed into that cycle of speed for the sake of speed in doc­toral research. He offers a sound cri­tique of the costs and ben­e­fits of AcBoW­riMo, namely that non schol­ars (say, school admin­is­tra­tors) will look at the results of AcBoW­riMo and think that it must be easy to write good schol­arly research in a short amount of time, leav­ing the slower writ­ers out of the run­ning for fel­low­ships, book con­tracts, and well, jobs.

But I enjoy hav­ing to write every day, because to fin­ish the dis­ser­ta­tion in any sort of rea­son­able time­line (not 15 years) I should write every day. Mar­tin also men­tioned in the com­ments that he lim­its his writ­ing to 600 words per day. Maybe I’ll give that a try.

Today was my last day of “work-cation.” The Mr. was invited to tour the Cap­i­tal build­ing (look at that view!) with the Cap­i­tal Archi­tect today, but it was an archi­tects only kind of thing so I took the kiddo to the National Gallery to point at col­ors and say, “woooooow!”

There’s a Mel Bochner exhibit at the National Gallery and while it wasn’t really the kid’s cup of tea, I was reminded of how much I love his work. He’s con­sid­ered the prog­en­i­tor of Con­cep­tual Art and would “draw” or “paint” por­traits with words. I used to paint, in fact, I was an art major in col­lege and kept up with it until grad school took over. But see­ing the Mel Bochner reminded me of the inter­pre­ta­tive act of putting words on the page. Usu­ally I just stamp them out on my key­board, ren­der them dig­i­tally with­out giv­ing the words them­selves much thought. They are a means to an end of the dis­ser­ta­tion. But when you paint words, you spend time with them, you’re thought­ful in a visual way that would oth­er­wise go ignored. I won­der what this kind of thought­ful­ness and time with words might look like for me now?

For those of you who are unfa­mil­iar, the exquis­ite corpse is a par­lor game invented by sur­re­al­ist André Bre­ton. He and his wacky sur­re­al­ist friends would get together and make a piece of art using col­lage. Each per­son worked on the piece one at a time until it was fin­ished. But there was a trick: each artist would cover all but a por­tion of their sec­tion before pass­ing it to the next con­trib­u­tor. Even artists get stuck, and this was a great way to stretch the cre­ative mus­cles while also cre­at­ing a process document.

This trans­lates very well to writ­ing and I often use it as my own game of writ­ing soli­taire. If I find myself stuck, I’ll copy a line or two of text from the end of a para­graph into a new Scrivener doc­u­ment and just start writ­ing from there. It doesn’t have to fit with the rest of the chap­ter, some­times it’s just a foot­note, but it keeps me mov­ing along.

Since start­ing AcBoW­riMo on Tues­day, I’ve made my best effort to write every­day and I’ve actu­ally learned a few things already.

One sig­nif­i­cant les­son learned: writ­ing tells you where the holes are. I got a lit­tle lost in my project last week when I tried to go to the library for Camp Dis­ser­ta­tion and I think this is because I was away from my writ­ing for a few days. By writ­ing every­day, I know my writ­ing and my project really well. I know what needs work and what I need to do to pol­ish it up. But if I don’t write, I don’t know what my next steps are. The holes exist, but as a night­mar­ish imag­i­nary space, haunt­ing the halls of my mind like those scary fuck­ing twins from The Shin­ing.

So I write every­day because no, I don’t want to go and play with them.