My Epiphany About Writing

Term papers, yikes! These words can bring terror, even if schooldays are a distant memory. Students often perceive term papers as a maze beset with dangers, rather than an opportunity to tackle something useful and rewarding. That’s why I decided to launch a series directed to students, teachers, and parents on ways to approach and vanquish this beast.

Writing a formal paper is like going on a trip. There are parallels between virtually every stage of the writing process and the stages of planning and executing a journey. If travel involves a two-hour drive for a day at the lake (middle-school essays), then the process of planning, undertaking, and enjoying such an excursion looks one way. If a person needs to pack up for a flight to London (e.g., high-school paper), then additional layers enter into the process. At the college level, you may think you’re planning a trip to the moon. Yet, in all three cases, similarities (and pitfalls) affect how well it all gets done.

So, particularly if a term paper or other serious writing is on the horizon for you or your student, do join me for this new series on writing (you can register here and it’s free for members of the Circle of Scholars). I will go step-by-step through the planning, preparation, and enactment stages. More importantly, I want to couple these steps with the encouragement students need to plow through temporary roadblocks.

In the sessions, expect some stories about student papers I have seen, as well as a few stories about my own adventures in writing. One of these stories tops the chart because it signaled my “great awakening,” so perhaps I will set the stage and tell it now.

I had entered into a Ph.D. program in musicology fresh off completing a master’s degree in piano performance, which means I had not undergone the “cleansing” experience of writing a masters’ thesis. Still, my doctoral coursework went well. I wrote slews of papers for seminars. My writing strengthened. But a dissertation, or any serious book, demands something more. And that “something” was still unknown to me.

After two-years of working and waiting, I rejoiced in the news of receiving a State-Department Grant to conduct my dissertation research in Leningrad. Studying in the land of Rachmaninov and Prokofiev had been my goal since I was twelve—a goal that, in those years, was not easy to pursue.

My “first Russian year” was like venturing onto a different planet. Maybe one day I will write a book about it, as I have been urged. Suffice it to say that few things adequately prepare someone to make a first-ever overseas trip into an officially hostile culture for the purposes of achieving something academically and logistically difficult.

Still, my efforts did bear fruit, usually after a lot of strategizing, crying, and, at times, screaming. After the grant, I moved to West Germany to finish the actual writing and get the dissertation over and done with.

My advisor was a saint. Dr. Howard E. Smither, a renown specialist in Baroque music, had a joyous enthusiasm for new topics and unlikely people. So, to the surprise of some, he had taken me as his advisee. In part, he wanted to probe topics in Russian music. (Later he decided to study Russian intensively and was invited to lecture in Moscow.) Also, I wonder if I did not simply amuse him, since I was, and remain, a bit different from the textbook academician.

This all happened in an era difficult for today’s students to grasp: the dawn of a technology called word processing. As it happened, Smither had decided to take new advisees only if they would invest in this fascinating technology and use personal computers and printers for writing the dissertation. Why? With word-processing, even as laborious as it was then in terms of the need to code individual words, an advisor could make endless editorial demands and push the student to draft and redraft without invoking the time and costs of retyping or paying someone to retype those chapters.

So I bought a brand-spankin’-new “portable” personal computer—an Osborne with 16 K storage capacity (yes, you read “K” correctly) per each of its two floppy discs! It was really something—a wonder indeed . . . except for the “portable” part. Television advertisements featured a lady in high heels, walking crisply through airports, toting her Osborne as if it were a purse.

Hah. That thing weighed a ton. Still Ozzy and I traversed the Atlantic to Dr. Smither’s office multiple times. I arranged to show him two early chapters during an international Musicological Symposium at Cologne, two hours up the road from where German apartment. We agreed to meet in the café of the conference hotel on a mid-afternoon. Surprisingly, the service part of the café was closed between the lunch and dinner hours. Still, no one prohibited us from entering the semi-darkened room, so we went in.

I will never forget Dr. Smither, positioning his tall frame behind a little round table and settling into one of those cute, uncomfortable metal chairs. He took my chapters, and nodded at me to find a spot on the opposite wall. He began to read. And read. And read.

These were not long chapters. Maybe eight pages for the first, and fourteen for the second. Forty-five minutes went by, maybe more. I was dying a thousand deaths, frantically envisioning the new field I would need if he dashed my hope of completing a dissertation en route to a professorship.

Finally he called me over. His face was somber, but his eyes were kind. “Well?” I said. (Remember, I had always had good grades on papers, so part of me was expecting some praise, at least.)

“Well,” he said, thoughtfully. “This would be marvelous, if . . .”, he paused.

Oh, those hateful “ifs”! Finally he continued “. . . if English were not your native language.”

Let that sink in a moment.

“English is my native language!” I shrieked internally. Fortunately, before those words could escape my mouth, he continued, “Don’t worry. Nothing is wrong here we cannot fix. Otherwise, the content is quite good.”

And fix them we did. I will forego the analogy of climbing Mt. Everest, because it wasn’t quite that big of a mountain. But it was a painful trek. And a humbling one. Primarily, I had to learn to write for the sound of the language (hence his reference to a “native tongue”). And I needed to develop heightened capacities to formulate, scrutinize, and eviscerate my words as needed. Finally, I had to accept the need for one particularly painful skill that capped the deal and made all the difference—a key point I will explain in the sessions.

These same principles can be distilled for even our youngest writers and that is what I want to do in our sessions together. Plus I want to talk about the physicality of the writing process for, like so many things in life, it requires grappling, pausing, and grappling again. It evokes frustration and has many discouraging moments. The process is never fully done. And yet few things engage or reward the mind and heart more than the challenge to fill a piece of paper with words that will come alive in the mind of the reader.

Remember, too, the joy expressed by little children when they first write their names, or scrawl out the words “cat” and “dog.” No longer are they watching from the sidelines. At last, they too can wield the power of the written language. And they know it! Thus, our calling, as teachers and parents, is to water and fertilize this joy, as best we can, while the child grows in stature and knowledge.