Homework: its prosaic, creative and therapeutic
Lately, I have having a lot of fun writing my papers. Last week I finished a 15 page paper analyzing a case study of a particular community development strategy. I chose myregion.org's "How Shall We Grow?" as an example of "community visioning".
I wrote the paper pretty fast, I surprised myself even. I think the reasons that organizing ideas and writing them down in a coherent format is coming to me easier now are, 1) practice (of course), and 2) I try to look at the task as a creative one. Sort of like creative writing, or composing a song. In my high school years, I put a lot of time into playing guitar and writing and recording multi-track, multi-instrument songs. It may seem strange, but when I am writing a paper or envisioning the outline and how my sources relate to the points I make and to one another, I am reminded (a feeling) of writing songs, of hearing how the parts of the song fit together in my head and then attempting to make it come out on cassette tape (this was in the mid-1990's, before CD burners were widespread) the way I heard it in my head. I feel the same pride (or frustration) in a well-composed paper that I used to feel in a gem of a song.
Lately, I have thought a lot about how playing music in my youth helped me to "get along" in the emotional malaise that characterized those years. I have wondered if I shouldn't take it up again. But perhaps research and writing ("written art", though neither poetry or prose) is my new creative outlet. I don't have much time anymore for playing music now that I am in school, married, working full-time, etc. But I have to make time every week for writing (for class). How convenient?