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April 19, 2006

Micro-Reels: Bring Head Phones!

Nicole Medeiros is writing her honors thesis on the history of Brazil's affirmative action program for Afro-Brazilians. Her research involved lots of time looking at old newspapers and other documents on micro-reels in the library. She has some words of advice for those embarking on this type of research:

My relationship with micro-reels began during my Sophomore year. A young and naïve history major, I worked for a professor in UCLA who needed a Stanford undergraduate to browse reels of nineteenth century Brazilian economic journals on campus. He sent me lists of specific tables and charts he needed from the journals, and I was super duper excited to begin my research. Well, let’s just say the fun only last so long. . .

When I began my own research, I was more prepared, and re-invigorated. I was looking for cool stuf — neat journals and newspapers from the Afro-Brazilian movement. I had learned the quirks of the machines. I had mastered the set-up, zoom, and scrolling features . . . Well, not entirely.

With micro-reels there are always unforeseen excitements and follies — losing yourself in the reel, changing lenses because the print is too small, and realizing — once you found the perfect article — that you do not have money on your Stanford ID card to scan and print the damn image. And, no matter how exciting your project, micro-reels can become tedious and boring. Plus, it just gets dizzying.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it. I mean browsing materials from hundreds of years ago is exciting. All facetiousness aside, it’s awesome. And, just today, I realized that you can scan the images to a computer and save them as tif or jpg. files. I know — amazing.

But, at the end of the day, no matter how cool you feel scrolling those reels, your eyes will get tired, your reel may get stuck, and you may just get damn bored. So, create a cool Real Reel Re-Mix. Grab that music player, and plug in those headphones. You will thank me for it.

Posted by hilton at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)

April 09, 2006

Writing Fiction: Three Jones Lecturers

The How I Write conversation on February 26, 2006 was a panel with three fiction writers. Tom Kealey, Tom McNeely, and Malena Watrous are all in the midst of writing novels. All three are Jones Lecturers in Creative Writing teaching fiction classes. This was the first time that a How I Write conversation focused on writing fiction, so it was exciting, and the three of them had very different insights into the process.

Steven Tagle attended the event and sent in these observations and comments. Steven is a film-maker and writer, majoring in English and Psychology, and he’s planning to do an honors project in Feminist Studies.

“If you’re not having fun, then why are you doing this?”

Kealey writes on the Caltrain everyday. He finds himself writing 2-3 pg scenes. It’s an hour of writing time back and forth. After he gets back to the city, he usually goes to a coffee house and puts in another hour of writing so that he can ride out his creative energy. Saturday is his big writing day. He goes to the UCSF library, spending 3 hours in morning and 2 hours in afternoon. He’s a very flexible writer. He sees writing as a marathon, not a sprint.

McNeely finds it hard to write without a large block of time. He can fiddle around at his computer for an hour.

For Watrous, it depends on her stage in the writing process. She works subtly, a little bit each day. During the rough draft stage, she works a steady 3-5 hours each day. The first draft is hard. She doesn’t write that linearly. She keeps going back to scenes. She has header and footer notes on her computer that say, “Move forward, ” and “If you’re not having fun, why are you doing this? ” She keeps many versions of her scenes. After writing, she goes through and highlights what she likes and what’s wrong. Once she sees the ending, she really wants to get there. In a 2-month period, she has written 200 pages. She just waits for that time when she sees the ending and works off of her excitement and fear.

Kealey writes on the train, commuting to Stanford. A lot of his sections are about the same length — whatever he can write during the commute. Hilton Obenzinger commented that he once spoke with a graduate student who wrote her whole dissertation on the train. She just bought a Caltrain pass and rode up and down the line between San Francisco and San Jose.

Kealey keeps a sheet of paper with his ideas. He has a plot point or two in mind to give him direction.

Watrous works with causality, fueled by a “deluded optimism. ” McNeeley has note cards that he moves around on a table, revising. There is a temptation to start from page 1 and revise. However, when revising on the draft itself, it is hard to delete things. It is much easier to put things on a page than to take them out. Therefore, Kealey suggests that you print out a draft. Open a new blank doc and insert what you like from the old draft into it. You can’t do a revision within a draft.

Watrous believes that real writing comes in the revision. For her, it is the funnest part. On a computer, she believes that you miss the proportion of each scene by scrolling.

When these writers get stuck, they read things, try to get away from their work, try not being so inside the problem. Watrous does a fun repetitive task. She believes that you’re working even when you’re not at the computer writing. Kealey works on multiple projects and enjoys declaring a “winner of the day. ” He suggests having 2 people to listen to you, 2 safe listeners. They can read your piece and tell you what they find interesting, what they’d like more of.

The element of the novel that Kealey tries to focus on is narration (what’s going on inside the heads of characters). We need to know what the characters are thinking, especially when it’s not what they say. McNeely and Watrous try to focus on description, dialogue, and plot. McNeely is uncomfortable with omniscience and the camera POV. He views the title as the first line lyric.

Kealey: Find a novel you admire and read it 3 times for structure. Piggyback that model for a while. Pick 4 times every week to write for 2 hours. Really hold on to that time and make the most of it. Write 7 pages or 3 sentences. At least you can say, “I wrote something last time, I can write something again. ” Always get words on the page. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You need to like your characters, like interacting with them. Make sure it’s fun. Maintain a sense of play. Be excited about it! You’re your first reader. For example, add a tiger just because you want to have a tiger.

Kealey suggests finishing a scene before jumping in to revise it. He also says to read your work to someone and to write a scene for a specific person. Watrous says to write your novel for yourself. Write the book that’s missing, that you would like to see on the shelf.

Response:

I found this installment of How I Write extremely valuable, especially since I am about to embark on writing a novel of my own. Each of the panelists had very distinct, quirky methods of writing, and I’m glad that they so freely shared the methods of their madness with us. Three main points that stuck with me were Kealey’s discipline in creating a writing routine, Watrous’ reminder to herself, “If you’re not having fun, then why are you doing this? ” and Kealey’s suggestion to always revise onto a new document. My writing style is a lot like McNeely’s. I require large amounts of time to write, and I often find myself wasting the small pockets of time that I do have. However, I would like to become a more disciplined, flexible writer like Kealey. I liked his idea of writing on the train because it gives you the illusion of productivity, being in constant motion. Watrous’ headers really stuck with me because writing should be fun, something you choose to do. However, there are many times that I make it a chore in my mind, and I should revise that way of thinking. Finally, Kealey’s suggestion to always revise onto a new document shows how much writing is about psychology, tricking yourself in that “deluded optimism” that Watrous mentioned.

Posted by hilton at 09:59 PM | Comments (1)

April 05, 2006

“It’s Like Aerobics for The Brain”

Kim Liao is writing a thesis about plays of Samuel Beckett and how different directors (including Beckett himself) have done productions. It’s the last quarter of her senior year, and Kim is trying to get herself into gear to take what has been an enormous amount of research and analysis and put it into writing. Here’s her reflection upon how working on her thesis has helped her to develop, and it’s quite moving:

I want to give myself the best possible opportunities to work on the thesis between now and May, to feel that I put my best effort in. With my new being-revised-in-progress calendar, I plan to have an entire rough draft by April 15, so that I can spend a full month revising. This quarter has given me some confidence that all of that will be possible. After pounds of paper in Xeroxes, many books bought with my summer stipend and more checked out from the library, I feel both armed and prepared to finish this task. Although I am still struggling through the end of Chapter 2, I know that I have written a lot.

And it has been a really formative, intimate experience — I have learned to depend on myself, and to allow myself the indulgence of time to really explore the options about why I’m writing. A project of this scope gives a very deep view of a personal academic project that I never could have gotten from classes. And now, classes offer me a chance to reflect on how far I’ve come. I remember when a 5-page or 10-page paper for a class was a very big deal.

It’s funny — I look up from my futon and see my Beckett bookshelf — I’ve been looking at my shelf of Beckett books every day for probably about six months. It’s funny for me to think about the thesis ending. It’s funny to think of all the things I’ve read, of all the things I always meant to read, and of all the things I’ll never touch, and how this research has changed me. How I’ve changed myself through the process of research, and of writing. It’s been like aerobics for the brain. It’s so hard for me to adequately express what this thesis represents for me. While I was uncertain about my plans for next fall, it represented any and all of my projects for the future over which I had some control — but the pressure quickly got too intense. A friend of mine said the other day, “It’s just a paper. ” And while he was right, and when I work myself into a frenzy over it, I should remember that, but when I sit back and reflect on the progress I’ve made, and what I want to do next, it is so much more than a paper. It is an experiment, the biggest challenge to me as a thinker and as a writer at this moment in time. It is a capstone experience that I can really feel I have spent my undergraduate career working towards. Now I just need to get a bit more sleep and calm the anxiety, and I’ll be all set.

Posted by hilton at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)