I had the most disgusting experience today. I had turned in a paper for my Hemingway class, and I knew it was not what it should have been when I did. There was something nagging at me about it, and I stayed after class to talk with my professor about it.
Once he started pointing out ways to make it better, it suddenly clicked with me what the problem was. I was looking at a high school paper, not a graduate student's paper, not a paper that is up to what I used to write. Apparently, I have become what I teach: a three-point thesis and a military outline structure.
I have devolved without knowing it. I feel ill. If I can get my kids to write at that level, I'm happy, but only because they have a good basic grounding from which to grow into that subtle, organic style that is a mature form of writing. From myself, I expect much more. Granted it's been a long time since I wrote about literature, but that the basic mechanics have so invaded my writing as to become obtrusive is unacceptable. It's like seeing the mechanism behind the illusion.
I don't know if I can get back to what I used to have. Maybe I've been hamstrung by my own teaching. All I know is that I have a week to see if I can refine this graceless lump into something with some elegance, and am definitely going to try.
Disclaimer: I am NOT trying to tell you what to do! :-)
ReplyDeleteI kow exactly how you feel. I know for a fact I used to be able to write quite well. I received a good deal of positive feedback back in the day.
Now, I feel like I should be even better having had so many years to read and absorb the styles of others, to learn new words, to gain perspective. I consider regularly (and toss the idea regularly) of going back to finish my English Masters, which when I quit it, lacked only either a thesis or one more semester. That is, of course, if they can turn up my old records for credit from ancient crypts.
Then I think, yikes! to be graded again! by people way younger than I, or worse, people I went to school with (because I know some of them are professors there now!) So I don't put myself out there. You have. I'm impressed with that.
One of the techniques I used in the old days, and one I'm trying again as I attempt some of that fiction writing I was once so sure was my calling, is to read aloud (to myself, no audience at this point) the pages. Somehow, I get a better idea of cadence and phrase that way. My eyes *hear* in my head. Spoken, anything broken or unwieldy becomes apparent.
I am going to disagree sight unseen with your description *graceless lump*. I just don't believe it.