Long vs. Short

So my thesis director posted a link to an essay regarding the absence of the novel in academia. It's a brilliant essay and I highly suggest you read it.

I personally have always had issues with keeping my writing short. I like to ramble. And I like to make things complicated. I just add layer upon layer and before I know it, I'm way beyond the scope of wrapping things up quickly. I know I'm good at creating conflict, I just haven't figured out how to create a nice happy resolution at the end, where the reader feels like all of their questions have been answered. But as a contemporary writer, do I even have to provide that service for my readers? I don't want to piss them off too much; then they'll never read any more of my work. But this is an issue I haven't really been able to work on in my creative writing classes because all we ever workshop is short stories or first chapters. :/ Even in my first thesis, I know my ending was weak. It was an extended personal essay, a string of anecdotes put together to analyze FIRST robotics as a religion, and in the end, it all kind of fell apart. It wasn't the best ending. I knew it. My director knew it. But still, it stands. :/ I'm still not happy with it, and I find that unacceptable. But rather than trying to beat that work to death and fix it, I'd much prefer to work on something new.

For this new thesis I'm working on, I already have kind of an idea of how I want to end it. End with the beginning. Circular kind of thing. It sounds lame when I reread that, but it makes more sense put into context. I know I'm being vague, and I'm sorry. I'm still trying to figure it out. But I want to try and like all parts of my life in this endeavor. Science Fiction. Creative Nonfiction. Writing. Science. Math. Music. Drama. Art. I'm going to try and make this work, but I need to make sure I don't bite off more than I can chew. I don't have a lot of time to get this finished, and since it's going to be a graphic novel, I really need a lot of time for the art part. It's sooo time consuming.

In both theses, there is a common strand. Rather than being long single pieces of work, they are collections of shorter works strung together in a way that makes sense. So maybe all of this training in writing short stories is actually rubbing off. The common string in the first one was a definition of religion, in which each bullet point was a segment I discussed in my anecdote. In the second one, I don't really have a common string. I have a theory that binds them together, but I don't have my story yet. The human aspect. The universality of it all.

I'm working on it. But I don't have much time.


In other news, the website that is supposed to be publishing my work has been down for about a week. :( Hopefully everything is okay, and they're just having mild technical difficulties.

Oh, I turned 22 last Thursday. I didn't really do anything exciting, just painted pottery with a few friends, and the day after, my mom came by and took me out for dinner and strawberry shortcake. One of my friends in aikido got me a cake (which we all shared after class yesterday), and Sensei was reminded that in all my 4 years at this dojo, I have still never had to do my Birthday Breakfalls. (I am expecting them tomorrow, and I am not excited about them.)

For those of you who remember Zombie Apocalypse Training, I've kinda started again. Besides going to aikido on a more or less regular basis, I've also been to the gym twice this week (going to try for at least 4x a week) to work on cardio, because my cardio sucks. So far so good, though. No passing out or anything. Hopefully by the summer I'll be able to graduate to a treadmill from the elliptical, and actually work on running. We'll see.