Scholar vs. Author?
A favorite professor of mine re-opened the topic of directed study/conference-presentable research paper (maybe I mentioned this a while ago). Now (since we're through the halfway point of the semester grumble, grumble, grumble), if I'm still interested, he'd like to be the adviser on a research project and he has an off campus (because there's one on) research conference he'd like me to submit for presentation at. As he and I were discussing research topics, the play on which I'm loosely basing Fail with Honor (the current short story WIP) came up. I told him the basic premise of my story and he was intrigued. He flipped through a couple of books on his office shelves and suggested that there might not have been much research really done to date on that topic. A quick search of JSTOR yielded me only a handful of articles which looked to be directly related. I still have the weekend to decide what I want to research on but/and I'm not really sure whether I want to read the articles I found. Because ...
What that would mean is that I would start doing scholarly writing about the character (previously written in ancient literature and figuring in a bit of Greek and Roman myth) whom I am writing creatively. Is that a good idea? I was rather intentionally not doing tons of re-reading of the Sophocles where I first encountered these characters so that I was freer to allow my version of the story to go where it wanted to go. For story writing how much research is too much? Have any of you out there written about existing characters not of your own completely original ::snorts:: creation? Like, Westside Story is a Romeo and Juliet adaptation ... but Fail hasn't (as yet) undergone the milieu change. What are the pitfalls of writing such things? One wishes to solicit general thoughts and advice from all happening by.
while working on some Latin, I watched Monty Python's Holy Grail last night with a friend who'd never seen it before. Monday my Classics Club will watch Python's Life of Brian. Which I've never seen before (boo) and so voted for (yay). Tomorrow I get to lead Worship (the singing/music part of the service) at my church. My pastor who normally does the front-man job is out of town. I'm really excited to see what God is going to do. I'm also a little nervous because I had an icky (as in nobody, including me, seemed to be able to play in time withe each other) rehearsal with my team Wednesday last.
What that would mean is that I would start doing scholarly writing about the character (previously written in ancient literature and figuring in a bit of Greek and Roman myth) whom I am writing creatively. Is that a good idea? I was rather intentionally not doing tons of re-reading of the Sophocles where I first encountered these characters so that I was freer to allow my version of the story to go where it wanted to go. For story writing how much research is too much? Have any of you out there written about existing characters not of your own completely original ::snorts:: creation? Like, Westside Story is a Romeo and Juliet adaptation ... but Fail hasn't (as yet) undergone the milieu change. What are the pitfalls of writing such things? One wishes to solicit general thoughts and advice from all happening by.
while working on some Latin, I watched Monty Python's Holy Grail last night with a friend who'd never seen it before. Monday my Classics Club will watch Python's Life of Brian. Which I've never seen before (boo) and so voted for (yay). Tomorrow I get to lead Worship (the singing/music part of the service) at my church. My pastor who normally does the front-man job is out of town. I'm really excited to see what God is going to do. I'm also a little nervous because I had an icky (as in nobody, including me, seemed to be able to play in time withe each other) rehearsal with my team Wednesday last.