Writing

I owe Jess a play. TOWER was way too dark, and it did not follow the parameters we set for it. That's fine. I'm happy with it, as uncomfortable as it makes me. And I am just as happy to try again.

But I critiqued a friend's paper tonight. A paper she is applying to grad school with.

I like critiquing papers. I do. I like seeing how a paper is trying to work and figuring out how it can work better. Academic writing is intriguing because it is a balancing act: how to juggle in-depth pertinent information without being stale and boring but also without being inappropriate and colloquial. How do you engage with secondary sources without sacrificing your own authority and voice? How can you be creative with it? Wonderful challenges. Fun challenges.

But it takes so fucking long to do a thorough critique of a paper. Not merely commenting on aesthetics, but getting dirty with it. I'm not sure I can write a play tonight because I just spent 2+ hours in a coffee shop reliving the glory days of teaching.

I don't know if she wanted as in-depth a critique as I am giving her. I'm not really sure what she expected when she dropped the papers on my desk. I warned her I wasn't nice and that I don't pussyfoot around. Many of my teachers pussyfooted around, and I never got any better. Not until my friend Nancy tore it all to shreds.

I solicited Nancy to be my adviser on a fellowship project exploring Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. She was one of two people on campus qualified to deal with Middle English poetry. "What do you want from me?" she asked when we first met. I wanted to say "I can sleepwalk my way into an A- just by turning a clever phrase, but I don't know how to write" but I didn't know her as well as I do now.

So I edited: "I have been getting A minuses for three years of college with no explanation of why it wasn't a B and why it wasn't an A. I want someone to be straight with me and tell me when I'm not writing well instead of pushing me through with a grade I won't complain about." Her eyes smiled. She was not teaching at this point because she had turned to the dark side of academia: administration (which she reluctantly started to enjoy). And Nancy loved the harsh and honest critique of papers as much as I do now. Because that's how you get better.

"No pain no gain," the beautiful deaf soccer player in high school would yell as he whizzed by us during one of our morning Brazilians.

I just wish I was faster at it. I barely wrote when I taught because I was always grading papers, and when I wasn't the last thing I wanted to do was think about words. Is that a balance I can teach myself, or is it physiologically impossible to push the brain that hard without illegal and dangerous stimulants that burn bright and quick?

Maybe I should be asking myself whether I should edit the end-comments for the paper I just critiqued. Like I said, I'm not nice. And, like I said, I don't know what she expected or how long she has to revise before applications are due or if she was even intending to revise or if she just wanted me to circle sentence fragments and the spaces where missing words should live. I hope I don't lose a friend over this. That would suck.