Writing about writing

Writing the paper for my independent study is an incredible process. I am combining so many different types of sources, including stuff from all those aformentioned interviews, that I feel more like a journalist again. Although lit reviews take up a necessary amount of space and require the intrusion of awkard citations at times, I am not doing a piece of "academic" writing.

I am mixing psychology and philosophy with the interviews of "regular" people, and then spicing all of it up with quotes from the literary arts (and one refrain of lyrics from Monty Python's "Life of Brian"). I don't know if I'm doing *good* writing, but it is at least readable and interesting. I'll have to remember Michael Cunningham's admonition to "over-write; then edit harshly."

But I am at least having fun. It is the first time in a LONG time that I have been obsessed with a piece of writing. I have so much to synthesize about what I've read and encountered, and my brain keeps noodling, revealing and changing what's revealed.

It's quite the process, this independent study. It's a good thing the school limits the number of credits you can do of this type of study because I would have been inclined, at my own peril, to do more of them. It is a BEAR to be disciplined and get the work done, but the process -- the reading, studying, considering, questioning, all of my own pursuit -- is highly enjoyable.

One of the sources I used was Isabel Allende's memoir, "Paula," which is the story of the year she spent caring for her comatose adult daughter before she died. I call it a memoir, but it is actually a long letter she wrote to her daughter while sitting for hours by her bedside. It is a book about the suffering of that seemingly endless pause one experiences when loved ones are in comas. (I know this from personal experience.) It is also an autobiographical book about Allende's life and her family history.

I read it while my youngest brother was in a coma. He died after four years of that. But Allende's book, well, perhaps it saved my sanity. It still remains the only thing I've ever read that comes close to describing my experience, and especially at the time, it was important for me to know someone else knew that particular pain. It was a validation. To have it come from a writer of Allende's power was most provocative.

Yesterday, when I pulled it out of the depths of my cabinet so I could find a quote from it, I was surprised when pictures of my brother -- face scarred, eyes vacant, mouth agape, wearing a fraternity baseball cap and, most oddly, a 1993 Hood-to-Coast t-shirt -- fell out from between some pages. There are so many ghosts in my home. So many ghosts.

And so it begins

On Sunday, I finally completed the transcription process for the interviews I conducted on death and the meaning-making people engage in around it. I typed a total of 179 pages in 11 pt Gill Sans, single spaced. Quite the undertaking.

I am now on page 11 of the paper I'm writing and am only just beginning. I will be diligently pounding away on my keyboard -- and then, if I do what is righteous, I will be deftly editing -- for most of the next few days. I anticipate turning in a complete draft or a significant chunk on Monday.

I am concerned that, even with good editing, this dog will be in excess of 30 or 40 pages. OK, the truth is that I'm concerned it will be in the neighborhood of 50.

Let me tell you something: For a two credit class, that shit just ain't right, man. It ain't right.

One of the reasons it's so long is that I'm weaving my personal narrative -- some of the aspects of my life story that have drawn my attention to this topic -- with several other substantial aspects of my study. Those include: what I learned from a review of psychology research; what I learned from "softer" sources, such as philosophy and mythology; stories and opinions about death from the interviews I conducted; and representations and/or discussions of death in poetry and literature.

The funny thing is that, in the end, I don't believe I'm capable of drawing any conclusions whatsoever -- except to note the multitude of ideas, opions and beliefs that people have about death, dying, life and the meaning of all of the above.

Kinda seems wrong to do so much work and write so many pages and not be able to draw any conclusions. But I guess that's what happens when you study, in a purely qualitative, phenomenological and subjective way, people's attitudes and meaning-making around the greatest mystery humanity has: death.

I said what?!

So, in my last blog entry, I mentioned that I was beginning the writing of a massive paper for a study I'm doing on attitudes about death and dying and the meaning-making that people engage in about it. I said the writing was about to begin.

Since then, I have been at my computer diligently, typing my poor little fingers to the bone.

To be precise, I have typed -- in 11-point Gill Sans, single-spaced, with a double return between paragraphs -- exactly 123 pages.

I'm sad to report, however, that I have as yet to type one goddamned single fucking word of my paper, which is due in a few short weeks. Rather, all those 123 pages account for several hours of interviews done with friends, colleagues and my yoga instructor about their attitudes and meaning-making around death.

And I still have more than three hours of interviews to transcribe, which is about eight or nine more hours of work because it takes so much longer to transcribe than it does to talk.

Let me say one thing here: JesusFuckingGod!

This is a valuable exercise. I am learning more just in the transcription process alone about how people organize their narratives around death. I'm also discovering how, even among people I know fairly well, there is a profound depth of diversity in attitudes and constructs about death, as well as life itself.

It is some really rich shit, man.

S2, for example, gave an amazingly succinct interview, utterly packed with useful quotes. It's almost as if she had been coached thoroughly by those who teach politicians to deploy sound bytes. Except for what S2 had to say was dripping with content; it's not at all the kind of fluff from which sound bytes are extracted. I suspect I am going to have to restrain myself from quoting her too often. I am a sucker for a good quote and always have been. Hers are like meaty, fleshy, tasty nuggets, densly packed and never trite.

Other subjects were more "story" oriented. The Florist, for example, shared a wild story about getting malaria, but then, for gravitas, provided some vivid examples of how nearly dying can radically overhaul one's life. Several others shared stories about how they almost drowned. And some talked at length about their feelings of guilt when others died, while they went on living.

For someone who loves a good story as much as I do -- and who also feels enriched when others share their thoughts on just about any subject, but especially the taboo ones -- this is like hitting the mother lode. I will mine it as deeply as I can.

But it is also annoying as hell, for example, to transcribe for HOURS the dialogue of someone who says "like" and "you know" repeatedly, as in, "She was, like, all like twitching, you know, and so I go, 'Hey, what's up with that,' you know, and she like goes, 'Like, what did you expect?' to me, like that."

I was, like, about to, like, kill myself, you know, when I was done transcribing that, you know? I was just totally done, man.

*sigh*

And then there are people repeat themselves excessively. At some point in my transcription, I found myself wanting to yell, I got it already! OK? I got it!

Some just went into excruciating detail. I asked one participant to "give a little biographical information" about herself, "whatever you think might be pertinent to this." ELEVEN MINUTES LATER, I'm caught on tape saying, Ah, thank you for that soliloquy. When she apologized and reacted in horror to learn I would be transcribing, I replied, It's OK. You were just warming up. So for my first question....

Additionally, because people often share more than they intended to in interviews like this, I am sending the transcripts to all the participants and inviting them to edit them -- to omit comments they never want to see in print or simply to clarify their comments. Some are taking me up on that; others are letting the interview simply be what it was.

The upside to all of this, though, is that I have some wonderful references, some really descriptive, beautiful narrative and some keen insights to use in my piece. For whatever reason, it has been difficult to find good references on meaning and death, so my interview subjects have filled in some important blanks for me. Further, their attitudes and experiences are diverse enough to make a highly interesting paper.

And now that they're typed in (mostly, anyway), all I have to do is cut and paste their comments into my paper.

When I finally get to writing it.

One thing ends; writing begins

I finished my Assessment class tonight.

I was anticipating a really boring class at the start of the term, and was apparently blessed to take it with a new instructor who had a easy-going wit to him. By boiling it down to what was going to be useful to us as professionals, the teacher managed to cover the significant assessments -- aka., methods of psychological testing -- and still keep it interesting.

Tonights final consisted of five group presentations, mostly composed of two students each. We had to pick a character -- famous, whether real or fictional -- and present a psychological evaluation on them. Four groups did straight presentations, including PowerPoint presentations. But me and my partner? No.

We did a role play.

In which my partner was a psychologist, and I was Frida Kahlo.

Sadly, I have never seen any footage of Frida Kahlo, nor ever watched the films about her. So there was no real character study going on here. I just learned what I needed to learn about her background -- which was plenty -- and then memorize a few actual quotes of hers to use. Alas, my interpretation of Frida seems to have come with a slight Russian accent. I don't know why.

But the whole performance -- "acted" out because her behavior was a part of the evaluation -- became a black comedy of sorts. My classmates did not know who the chacter was: We were all playing a game of "Guess Who?" as a way to keep things interesting. So as they listened to my theatrical, over-wrought responses to certain questions, they fell out with laughter.

For example, the psych asked me about my marital history, and in part, I replied: "There have been two grave accidents in my life. One was when a streetcar knocked me down. The other accident was (my husband)." She was referring to Diego Rivera, of course, but to keep our classmates guessing about identity, we did not use the names of spouses.

Another time, I said of my habit of drinking a bottle of brandy a day: "I started drinking so I could drown my sorrows, but it seems the damn things have learned how to swim."

My classmates did not recognize these responses as the words of Frida Kahlo, nor many other facts that came to light. When I identified one particular Rorschach tile as "my bloodied, fractured pelvis" and another as "Kandinsky's version of the Eiffel Tower," they absolutely roared with laughter.

It was a bit awkward. I suppose my acting prompted some of the laughter -- and sugar highs from the last-night snacks that classmates brought in must have accounted for some of it, as well. But it was a little odd to have such a tragic sort of character bringing my classmates so much joy.

I suppose I got an 'A' anyway. No matter what, I'm just happy to be done with the class.

....

On a totally different note, now that this last project is out of the way, I can and must begin the writing of a significant paper for my death & dying study. I've been feeling pretty blocked around this topic, particularly around the part where I have to address my own perspective and how it relates to the study I've undertaken.

It's unusual for me to experience blocks in my writing. It may be less a block, though, than it is a problem of mental organization. There may just be too many words trying to get down the shoot all at once. And at the same time, I feel a bit hounded by my own perfectionism. It's leaving me a little tongue-tied as a writer.

However, in that odd way that things in my home just kind of ... turn up ... I found on my desk this week a scrap of paper on which I wrote some notes at a lecture I attended in the spring of 2000. I'm not sure how such a thing managed to find its way to this desk, three homes later, but ... here it is.

It is a collection of writing tips offered by author Michael Cunningham the night he spoke at the Portland Arts & Lectures Series. Cunningham had recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, "The Hours," which is a modern literary work I admire greatly. His writing was spare and elegant, and he somehow managed to make the suicide of Virginia Woolf a really lovely moment, even under the weight of its sadness.

These are his words of advice, which I captured seven years ago and which have turned up just when I am beginning a significant writing project:

-- Be audacious.

-- Write things you "don't have the right" to write.

-- Don't spill the beans; keep the magic all for yourself.

-- A good read isn't so much in the plot as in the telling.

-- Over-write; then edit harshly.

-- Don't keep asking "What is the point?" Let the writing and the characters lead you there.