« Getting Absorbed in Your Topic | Main | Writing Fiction: Three Jones Lecturers »
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 April 5, 2006 11:34 AM