I’m back in class once again. Instead of napping, working, eating, I get to spend sixteen hours a week listening to case studies and discussing the nuances of human resources management. Enthralling stuff, especially after eight hours of New York State employment – it’s safe to say I’ve have my fill of HR interaction.
A week ago the very concept of class was dangerously foreign like some elaborately named disease. The idea that I might soon be sitting in new rooms with new teachers besides unknown participants engaging in ambiguous activities toward frequently capricious ends was frightening, dispiriting, absurd…
Now that I’ve attended both of my two classes it’s all very routine. A single visit, a single experience and I’m struck by an epiphany of triviality – how perfectly uninteresting it is. I’ve been doing this for years. I’ve taken more classes than there are hours in a week, weeks in a year, weeks in my life. It should be old-hat, but that’s only true once I’ve started. Until that moment, it could be anything, everything, something.
This particular round of classes only lasts a month – summer classes are compressed sprints. It’s a preferable situation for me. I’d much rather knock through two classes in a month but hardly than spend three months slogging through irrelevancy. I’m impatient with a side of ambitious. The one-month-jaunt suits me fine.
It is, I propose haphazardly, similar to my approach with writing. I read, with some despair actually, interviews, memoirs, & whatnot, of authors who spend months on a short story. How can this be true? Surely, these authors are lethargic or hyperbolic. Maybe they spend months on a story, but really only minutes in a day. They stretch out what I compress. There’s no way they spend full days, long stretches of directed erudition, on a single short story. That can’t be possibly be true, right?
Writing tries to pretend it’s some ineffable process, but it’s really just a matter of practice and perseverance – at least I work under that premise. The ambiguity comes up in the matter of craft. What is good writing? Not a legitimate question, so there’s no especially legitimate answer. It’s safe to say that there is categorically bad writing, but good writing becomes a matter of taste and style and genre and trend. Harder to define.
It’s safe to say that with only some small variation people can type or hand write at similar speeds. The variation may come down to coming up with ideas, but I tend not to consider that writing. Yes, it is impossible to write without an idea, or many, but most ideas don’t become anything. Writing is implementation and engineering, it’s an applied science.
If then, writers are spending months on a short story, is it because they lack enough ideas, or perform research, or include so many other integral tasks that I would not myself consider writing? Are their stories meticulous laid out whereas mine are more spontaneous in generation, creation, and polish? Perhaps. I should like to think so.
The alternative is that I write 1,000 words over a week or so with editing and someone else does the same over three months, that I spend a few hours or days working through ‘craft’ and they spend weeks agonizing over a sentence. This may very well be true and it’s a painful sort of realization insofar as I already know I’m impatient. I may very well be self-sabotaging myself on the grounds of prolificy. Then again, I’m not trying to be the writer of something, I’m trying to be a writer. I want my writing to be good always, not just good once. I’d rather have a string of eloquent articles, short stories, memorandum, and lists than a single magnum opus. Somehow this represents a compression of time – no task taking more than just a little, with the aggregate remaining equal.
I should like to take longer on something – just once at least – to see whether it matters. I happened to finish a short story this week. Editing was painful and I’m not completely happy with it. I’ve put it aside for now, sent it to a friend, filed it away in my byzantine collection of directories. Maybe next week I’ll skim it again and the week after that. Maybe I’ll skim it once a week for months, maybe years, until it seems worth remembering. Maybe I’ll do that to see if there’s anything to it.
In the mean time, I have class. Only a month, and I wouldn’t have it otherwise.
Lastly: an article about Macaque self-portraits.
