I finished my final paper for my Shakespeare class. It was one of the most intense papers I’ve ever had the honor of tackling. It took weeks of pulling research, preparing an annotated bibliography, suffering through YouTube(R) clips of actors good and bad recreating the Bard’s work, giving up on my goal of writing enough of my own fiction to meet the requirements of NaNoWriMo and (most important) losing sleep. When I look at the copy on my computer, I still don’t know what I wrote. I just hope the instructor likes it.
I had epiphanies at two in the morning that kept me awake long enough to grab a pen and try to jot down the inspiration without turning on a light. Unfortunately if I had turned on the light, I would have realized that my pen was out of ink, and in the morning all I had was some scratches on a blank paper.
Sometimes an idea would come along while driving on the freeway. That’s not the best place to be inspired, and at my age ideas that spring to mind one minute are gone the next, so they didn’t help.
The entire time I was writing the paper, I was besieged by the doubt gremlins. I’m not a real writer. I can’t get any useful information out of an online resource. I won’t get 14 pages done on time. The instructor will hate it. All familiar bedtime companions, those gremlins.
I wanted to put some new spin on old ideas (really old when it comes to Shakespeare), maybe say something different that millions of high school and college paper writers on Shakespeare haven’t said. In the end I worried that my “Pelican Brief” looked more like Ralphie’s composition in A Christmas Story. Instead of a compass in the stock and a sundial (the “thing which tells time”) accessorizing that young man’s much desired BB gun, I was dealing with a handkerchief and a Moor.
I found out in class that everybody loved Othello, so my gremlins spent the rest of the week laughing in my ear because the poor instructor will likely be reviewing 20 or more papers on Othello, with mine either first to go and be criticized more, or last on the pile and subject to hopeful scrutiny based on how well or poorly the others wrote before me. If they wrote too much fluff, I’m doomed, because mine will surely “put out the light.”
As a writer I always worry about the slush pile, that netherworld where many manuscripts go but few return. Term papers are the ultimate test of what your writing says about you. I’ve gotten good grades before, so I’m not overly concerned about A’s or B’s, but ultimately it’s the acceptance of what you’ve done, rather than the grade, that makes the writer sigh with relief.
It will take awhile for the grades to come in. In the meantime, I’m going back to my fiction world and the promise of a completed story. At least that’s the plan once the reality that the semester is over kicks in.
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