Writing, Goals, and Writing Goals (repost)
This was the second post on my old blog. I’m still planning to re-post these in chronological order. As before, I have lightly edited this one. My current focus on editing has sharpened my eye for inefficient prose. I am trying not to change past me’s voice, though.
One quick update. I recently realized, through my struggles with a novel I was trying to write, that my jam isn’t what I thought. Because I love to read fiction so much, especially SF and other epistemology-driven genres, I assumed that I must be a fiction writer. It turns out that I’m a creative nonfiction writer. I don’t mean “I am” like it’s my biological essence or anything, it’s just the mode I naturally fall into. I’ll write a post about that sometime. Anyway, within that broad category of “creative nonfiction,” I write a mix of things that lean more toward exposition and journalism. Either way, I like to write personal narrative, which goes along with my scholarly interest in epistemology. Personal narrative allows me to show/tell not just what I’ve learned, but how I learned it and why it matters. I call it “creative” because I love literary language, both reading and writing it. What do I mean by that? Well…you know: metaphor, personal voice, words that convey emotion or gesture. Even when I’m writing about a scientific topic like photosynthesis, I use that same voice, and I sprinkle contextual information. Actually, I often go through wormholes of contextual information. When I revise a piece, I try to turn that time- and space-bending flood of material into what feels more like a “sprinkle.
While editing this piece, I focused on streamlining sentence structures and removing scare quotes and parenthetical, with the goal of making the prose more clear and less prescriptive about how you should feel about it or respond to it. I also added a couple of parenthetical notate bene, or NBs. (I looked that plural form up in the Wiktionary, LOL.) Anyway, here it is:
Writing, Goals, and Writing Goals
originally published 06 April, 2019
I’ve been silent here for awhile, but silence doesn’t necessarily indicate stillness. My writing goals have been solidifying, coming into sharper focus. Before the New Year, I set a goal of drafting at least one new short story per month, while also revising and polishing at least one – and sending out for publication any that I consider “polished”. I also set a goal of reading two books per month.
So how am I doing? Well, in January [NB: 2019] I worked on, but didn’t finish, polishing an old short story. It was something I wrote during the year before I started my MA at UVM. I was taking undergrad English courses that year, and I made a point of including creative writing courses in my lineup every semester. Actually, it was a creative journaling course that got me interested in going to grad school to begin with. I met my two-book reading goal in January.
Then February happened. I had to move at the end of that month because the people who own the home I was renting wanted to sell it. They offered to buy my roommates and me out of the last 3 months of our lease as incentive to move out early. We accepted. I was also ending a relationship at the time, so I wanted (needed) to live alone for at least a year. I started apartment hunting in early February, then I had to pack and wrangle all of the details that go along with…all of that. It was a stressful time. The stress didn’t go away on March 1st, even though I had finished moving (by the skin of my teeth). I spent most of March getting settled into my new place, while also working full-time. That’s just how it is now, in postmodernity or post-postmodernity or late capitalism, or…whatever we’re calling it now.
I know, I know. The terms “postmodern” and “late capitalism” are interrelated. Fredric Jameson named a book after their relationship: Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. More about that in a minute.
Suddenly it’s April. Now…what? What’s next? These are the questions I’ve been asking myself while burrowing through the work and the stress of securing new housing, then relocating, then unpacking. Because I have ADHD, none of these processes have followed a linear trajectory to a neat conclusion. At this point in my life, I have learned to accept that I exist mainly in the gray areas, wandering between and around certainties, never fully landing on any of them. I don’t trust binaries. Yet somehow, I manage to make decisions and reach conclusions.
I won’t bore you with a map of my wanderings. Here are my conclusions:
I hereby forgive myself for not keeping up with my goals while I was pre- and post-move. It’s OK to take them up again, now. I didn’t fail, I just had more pressing priorities.
Blog goals: I am going to use this blog for whatever I want, basically. But I do have a new tentative focus: material from my dissertation project. I doubt that this will be the only thing I write about here, but it will certainly be a recurring, major focus. Because of how my brain works, and because of how that project took shape, the pieces I post will probably skip around in terms of both form and content. I’m not going to try to impose a logical, developmental arc. If anything like an arc takes shape on this blog, I will export it to MS Word and make it into a publishable piece.
Creative writing goals: nothing new to say here. I’m going back to my goal of drafting one short story per month, and polishing one short story per month.
And that’s about it, for this re-kickoff. It’s probably worth mentioning that my dissertation project was vaguely interdisciplinary (like me), incorporating science, science fiction, and marxist cultural studies. More specifically, I set out to examine evolutionary and genetic narratives in utopian SF. In these blog posts, I’ll be writing in a variety of different genres.
Sometimes I’ll write literary criticism. I mean that in an academic sense: arguing about the meaning and significance of a text, rather than whether or not a given text is good, bad, a must-read, or a tosser. However, I intend to frame these pieces for a general audience, not literary scholars. I’ll try to avoid jargon, and if I use it I’ll explain it.
Sometimes I’ll write my explication of a critical theory text (Jameson’s Postmodernism is already on the set list). [NB from 2025 Sharon: I still haven’t written this!]
Sometimes I’ll write bits focused on genetics, genomics, and evolution: a mix of the scientific and cultural implications.
And sometimes I’ll probably dedicate a full post to defining a term or a cluster of terms.
