For my second blog, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how the first project is going. The truth? It isn’t. I’m having a harder time then I thought I would writing about myself and the process it took to finish my paper for my senior capstone class. How does one get back to that mindset? What was the process? Should I even write about that stuff? Maybe I’m becoming too focused on the works of the personal essayists we’ve been reading, and like Lynn Bloom says, I’m having trouble silencing the nay-sayers in my head that tell me I’m not as good or clever as them.
I know several things about my capstone paper that I want to communicate: one, that it was personally meaningful for me to write it, and two, that it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to write, not just because of the subject matter, father and son relationships, but because the enormous amount of research I had to sift through. It was the first time when writing a paper that I thought, “I’m going to have to pick and choose what I want to include, even though I want everything to go in here.” The paper, and topic, spurred so many ideas in my mind that I wanted to include every last one of them.
I suppose I could take the more autobiographical route, and discuss how the research had me thinking back to my relationship with my own father. Then something Bloom said, that “every writer of creative nonfiction is an Ishmael who alone has lived to tell the tale-the true story that only he or she can tell,” stuck out in my mind (72). Why not talk about how writing the paper helped me deal with a “lifetime of questions” about my father, as Norman Maclean eloquently put it in A River Runs Through It, while also talking about the process? Bloom seems to interweave both the personal and the academic effectively when talking about the process of writing creative nonfiction, along with the realization of her having a twin that her parent’s attempted to cover up. The transition between the two topics was seamless. This gives me hope for my paper.
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A great deal of what you wrote in your blog could very well make its way into your paper. You were essentially just writing about your thoughts and feelings while composing your senior capstone paper. Looks like you have a good start!
I suppose I could take the more autobiographical route, and discuss how the research had me thinking back to my relationship with my own father.
I like this idea...a combination of autobiographical info. plus research process seems like a happy medium. My first draft of the personal essay had not so much detail on the autobiographical aspect, or on how writing the paper actually effected me personally, so I went back and, for my final draft, added a lot more detail about that stuff. It looks like writing this blog post helped you do a lot of "discovering" about your paper!
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