John Hattaway

I am taking a brief brain breather to post that I have started and stopped several posts. They get about two paragraphs into a thought and then realize that it’s not what I am really thinking about and then delete the post I am trying to write and move on to something else. At present, I am doing some simple searches for various wilderness-type writing and essay’s that help illustrate the points I am trying to make about Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book that outlines a single seasonal cycle in Virginia for Dillard during her early years after college. According to the professor I have who has been going on about the genius of various people, a genius I, in many cases, disagree with, Dillard gave him, once, a reading list that, twenty years later, the professor is still working on reading his way through. Either the professor is a slow reader, which is possible, or that Dillard’s reading list, though impressive, is not what the professor is actually interested in reading.

What I pointed out to a friend, who has also been a professor in a couple of the classes I’ve taken over the years, is that a successful author, regardless of capability, will often be hired by a university and allowed to teach creative writing because the writer is a name and many universities want to promote the fact that they have a name who is also successful. On the (to me) interesting side of things is that this friend has written and has had published a couple of books and he is currently writing another book, and that his research efforts include his travel and research for the creative project he is working on, with the outcome being that he has extra money paid by the university to write a novel.

There is a part of me, in all of this, that makes me want to write something rather overtly religious. I have not, as yet, in part because it touches pretty directly on a conversation Erin and I were having earlier in the day. And yet, when I sat down to think about what I would like to share I didn’t come up with anything. What makes this interesting to me is not that I am writing about this, but that this touches on what I think Writer’s Block is. Whether or not something else needs to be written is less of an issue to me than sitting down and working through some of the things that I need to be working on.

I don’t know what needs to be really worked on. I do know there are books to read and papers to write. My English Language professor announced that he would be discussing a paper we had to write for his class. That looks to be interesting to me. One more paper to write. I also get to write a paper on The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. Take a test later this week. And write the one-act play. This semester is coming to a close. It is coming to a close very quickly.

Maybe, and this is me spitballing, I think I am beginning to feel the pressure of the projects and educational responsibilities that are coming to an end. Must be why I need to focus in other areas.

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This entry was posted by smokingpen on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 12:25 am and is filed under On Writing, school. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.