When I grow up I want to be a writer

Umm so I'm going to write here for awhile and get the writing juices flowing again, and then switch back over to my thesis chapter and hopefully I won't even notice and I'll just keep typing. I have one section of the chapter I need (yes, NEED. No more excuses) to finish tonight, and then one big, one medium, and one short section to do tomorrow, and then it will be a beginning-to-end draft. I don't think it's particularly good, but hopefully my supervisors won't notice because they'll be reading it when they're stuffed full of pudding and they've had one too many egg nogs. Maybe they have blogs on which they'll post all my nonsensical sentences and make fun of them. I deserve that.

Really I'm happy enough just to be getting a beginning-to-end draft done before Christmas, and I can make it tight in January. I don't think I'm going to be in the mood in January for a fresh writing project. The thought of starting a whole new chapter right now makes me think I'd rather be pulling the hairs out of my head one by one, or watching paint dry, or poking myself in the eye. So I might take it a little easy and just fix up this chapter that is almost done (I've been saying "almost done" since Wednesday. Aaahh!). That will be nice portable work anyway. I can get sand and salt water and beer all over my own manuscript and it doesn't matter.

I feel like my writing at the moment is fairly vague, and a little lacklustre. I don't enjoy reading writing like that, so it's frustrating to be producing writing like that.

Before I started the whole postgrad thing I took writing for granted. I didn't realise how much of this project, and academic life in general, is about developing your writing skills and thinking about your writing skills and lamenting your writing skills and using your writing skills as a yardstick for measuring self-worth, and comparing your writing skills to everyone else's writing skills. It becomes THE thing that defines you as good, or not good, at your work. Of course, that's ludicrous. There's plenty of other important skills and attitudes to have.

If I could choose one special skill to have, I'd choose writing. But I think I've always felt like that. For as long as I've been playing Psychologizer anyway, because that's always a question that comes up. I do quite like writing, and I'd like it more if I was more confident in my skills. I'd also like to be able to do creative writing, not just academic writing. My creative writing is always so lame, and I haven't had the guts to seriously give it a go since I was a teenager. Maybe once the thesis is done I'll do a creative writing course, to balance things out. I do notice that when I read fiction or poetry my own writing gets better, even if I'm writing non-fiction. So they're probably two facets of the same skill, rather than two different skills. They rub off on one another.

I think that's sufficient distraction and procrastination for now.