Term papers due: 14/01.

Word count: 1267/5000; 0/5000.

Say it with me, reader: fuck.

With the exception of my undergraduate thesis, I have never not done this. I’ve never drafted and re-drafted a term paper. I’ve never not left something until the absolute last moments. I have never finished something without a tremendous amount of pressure hanging over my head. For that matter, I’ve never properly finished something.

I can’t yet work slowly and methodically over extended periods — I work best in bursts. The other day, I spent six hours at a library desk, not counting breaks. I think I wrote about two sentences. Then, in the forty minutes I spent at a coffee shop on my way somewhere else, BAM, 350 words.  Good ones, too. Wallowed around all day today, accomplished nothing. Mom pokes her head in, asks me if I want to go to a movie in an hour. Sure, I say. But crap!, got to get to work. BAM, another 300-odd good, solid words.

Burst by burst, scraps of an argument get slapped onto a page. Later, when my head is clear, I go back to them, and then I can spend hours picking up the throughline of the argument, out of the muck in whatever introductory paragraph I’ve slapped up, and gently and slowly securing it as I progress through the rest of the scattered bits, shuffling them around, securing them to that central line. I tie it off and leave it for a while; then I go back, slacken here, tighten there, sneak in a pretty little arabesque or two, and finally nail each end to something solid.

That final, organizational process is the most fun, the most beautiful — for that, I have (almost) endless patience. It sometimes devolves into inane tinkering, but it’s usually great fun. I remember learning how to do it — Professor Wry taught it to me, perhaps inadvertently, as we stitched up my thesis together. And she taught me to enjoy it.

I’m not an undergrad anymore, reader. I’ve begun an apprenticeship. You can’t do objectively good work in M.A. term papers. Everyone knows this. Objectively good is not the point. These projects are preparatory; they’re about process, not product. This is where I need to unlearn those habits, develop new rhythms, learn slowness and method in my approach, forsake the slapdash and the quick fix.

But I’ve still to figure out how to make the initial stages work the way I want them to, without someone else’s whip flailing at my back. One of the things I love about Brit Uni is that no one’s breathing down my neck. One of the things that cripples me is that no one’s breathing down my neck. My undergraduate self was motivated, in part, by passionate desperation to please her teachers; my graduate self, evidently, cares more about meeting her own goals, about not falling on her face when she tries to test her wings. She’s growing up.

It’s an awkward stage, is this academic adolescence known as the Master of Arts degree. I don’t trust myself to do this on my own, and yet here I am. The Heretic doesn’t want drafts of my More paper: he wants a paper, and knows I can write one, so off he sent me, with a sheaf of bibliography and his blessing, to write it. The Philosopher forked over some Benjamin and a pile of citations in French, Aristotled me and tripped off to bask in the Marseillaise sun, where my misadventures are the farthest thing from her mind. Professor Wry now greets me as a friend; her familiar grip on my hand, from the powerful guiding force of a teacher, has become the firm, reassuring grip of a friend.

And here I am, with my scraps of one thing and my blank expanses of the potential existence of another thing. On my own. We’re nearing the eleventh hour, reader, and I’m on my own. I need to learn how to do this. I am learning how to do this.

And frankly? It scares me fucking shitless.