good spots to hang your top hat
(cross-posted from my writerly blog, Banners of Death)
Welp, classes are done for the semester. This past week was ridiculous - I had an Experimental Forms final due and lost a weekend to the irredeemable shitshow that was the Maryland Film Festival. The final project wouldn't have been so bad, but given my professor's enthusiastic response to the midterm, I felt that expectations were high. As a lifelong underachiever, this was a new and uncomfortable experience (which I've probably mentioned here numerous times already).
Plus, writing the final was rather emotionally draining. I've found over the course of this semester that it's easier for me to access certain kinds of stories through experimental writing. I don't, for example, do much with romance or boy/girl sexual tension because a) it all feels corny and over-rehearsed to me, and b) I suck at communicating it. I'm much better with distance and alienation and the grotesque, and felt confident that every other writer on the planet (especially my buddies in genre) could pick up the slack elsewhere. But certain emotions are much easier to indulge through my preferred experimental formats (i.e. lots of graphics and manic prose-poetry). I can't say why that is, although I'm sure obscuring that stuff in purposely-difficult prose/format helps writers who, like me, are tighter than the bark on a tree when it comes to certain feelings.
What I'm trying to say/chasing rabbits around is that I was able to make a much greater personal investment in this piece than I usually do - it might not show up as a literal effect of the prose, but it's in there. The actual project isn't what I wanted it to be, but time got in the way of that, so I'm going to just accept that it's done and await the ruling from on high as to how good it actually is. But I also feel like I've taken a step in the right direction, and that regardless of what's wrong with this project, it has a heartbeat.
Welp, classes are done for the semester. This past week was ridiculous - I had an Experimental Forms final due and lost a weekend to the irredeemable shitshow that was the Maryland Film Festival. The final project wouldn't have been so bad, but given my professor's enthusiastic response to the midterm, I felt that expectations were high. As a lifelong underachiever, this was a new and uncomfortable experience (which I've probably mentioned here numerous times already).
Plus, writing the final was rather emotionally draining. I've found over the course of this semester that it's easier for me to access certain kinds of stories through experimental writing. I don't, for example, do much with romance or boy/girl sexual tension because a) it all feels corny and over-rehearsed to me, and b) I suck at communicating it. I'm much better with distance and alienation and the grotesque, and felt confident that every other writer on the planet (especially my buddies in genre) could pick up the slack elsewhere. But certain emotions are much easier to indulge through my preferred experimental formats (i.e. lots of graphics and manic prose-poetry). I can't say why that is, although I'm sure obscuring that stuff in purposely-difficult prose/format helps writers who, like me, are tighter than the bark on a tree when it comes to certain feelings.
What I'm trying to say/chasing rabbits around is that I was able to make a much greater personal investment in this piece than I usually do - it might not show up as a literal effect of the prose, but it's in there. The actual project isn't what I wanted it to be, but time got in the way of that, so I'm going to just accept that it's done and await the ruling from on high as to how good it actually is. But I also feel like I've taken a step in the right direction, and that regardless of what's wrong with this project, it has a heartbeat.