Monstrous Manuscript
The word 'manuscript' is little bit intimidating, especially when it stands alone, as in: "You'll all be writing manuscripts this quarter."
Manuscripts about what? Manuscripts following what guidelines? Fulfilling what ends?
None of these questions were raised, let alone answered, during the first week of my spring quarter program, Monstrous Possibility. The only thing we were told about our manuscripts-to-be was that they would be included in an anthology at the end of the quarter. There are no requirements about length, content, form, structure, or copy standards. The possibilities were monstrous.
Some people in the program took this as an opportunity to pursue, revise, or expand on ongoing projects. I, on the other hand, was taken aback – the task of starting something new, mapping out a life plan for an idea that doesn't even exist yet, was appropriately daunting. Of course, thinking about an unborn idea is the surest way to kill it, so I tried to let the program material guide my creative thinking (I knew one thing for sure: my last big project at Evergreen would be creative, not analytical).
Sure enough, the ingredients of my project manifested almost immediately. During the first lecture of the quarter, I found that my notes looked more like poetic snapshots than reasoned outlines. So for the first two or so weeks, I took the meat of my lecture notes and translated them into poems, reworking them around devices like repetition, alliteration, rhyme, assonance, and space-use. By about the third week, though, I cut out the restructuring process and started taking my notes as poems, committing to the page only words that I felt really belonged there.
At this point. I've begun a new translation period. Since we're nearing the end of the quarter, it's time to stop adding material and start "cleaning up" our manuscripts. As it stands right now, my manuscript is a series of dated entries, with no guiding theme except for the method in which they were conceived. So my clean-up process will consist in rewriting the piece – that is, re-translating it – according to the way it sounds. This means I'll need someone to read it to me...over and over and over again. Any volunteers?