Bringing Forth the Subconscious: Reflecting on reflecting about Plan decisions that seemed to happen without a lot of thought

Hi hi hi people who have decided to read this annoying blog about my life that I rarely consistently update! Bless you all.

These next few days are going to be full of hard work. Geraldine wants a full draft of my Antony and Cleopatra paper by Wednesday (and Queen Elizabeth presentation for Monday), T. needs at least two chapters by Tuesday, and Sean doesn't exactly know this but he needs me to catch-up on my Latin vocab by next week...and I still haven't seen Thor 2. 

Amidst all this craziness I was looking through my  Fall 2012 semester folder, and stumbled upon an exercise Paul Nelsen had me do during Plan Seminar that semester. Reading it over inspired me anew on these projects that I've been working on or toward for two years. And since I really can't procrastinate any more, I copied and pasted it below. Now it's time for PLAN PLAN PLAN. Enjoy!

October 25th, 2012

How I Got to My Plan Project

            My main Plan project is writing a YA historical fiction novel about a girl who goes back in time to the original production of Shakespeare. There’s a lot more to the story than that, but that sentence is what I use to get the idea across to people – I want them to know that what I’m writing is fun, but also an academic project. Which is exactly what this project is so far – it’s the kind of piece I’ve always wanted to write, and further, it encompasses a lot of what I’ve become interested in as my college experience has progressed: Shakespeare, historical context, fiction, grammar, linguistics, etc. It’s everything I was hoping Plan would be for me, but recently I’ve noticed that I have absolutely no idea how I came to decide on this project. In this piece of writing, I want to try and figure that out.

            I’ve never written Young Adult work before this piece. I have mainly written stories close to my real life experiences – mostly taking a moment from a relationship that I had with a guy and writing about it, changing the names or slight details so that I didn’t feel guilty/like I was plagiarizing these guys by writing them as characters. But last semester I grew tired of this kind of writing. I wanted to write something I felt was more fiction, and less just dramatizing my own experiences. So when I thought about what I wanted to do for Plan, I thought about writing something for a slightly younger set of people. When I was in high school, I’d written a fairytale play for middle schoolers, which worked out really well. Writing for people just a tad younger than me made sense.  And I had a little bit of authority and reflection on being a high schooler, so that’s where I placed my story. There’s also a pretty strong link between drama and teenagers, in more ways than one.

            My decision to use Hamlet mostly comes from my own experience. The first time I fell in love with Shakespeare I was commuting on the way home from school. As I began the play, I felt myself disappearing into the text, furiously making notes, only coming up for air when I needed to change trains or get on a bus. This moment was magical for me. I want my main character to have that moment with the play that I did; I want to capture what it’s like to feel a connection to a text. From that feeling came the idea that reading literature is so magical that it could accomplish amazing things...like taking a character back in time.

           Write what you know. It’s the rule I have always followed – it’s a rule preached by many creative writing teachers, and it’s one that works for me. This project stays safely in that rule, while the same time spectacularly breaking it. I know high school, I know high school relationships, I know the life of a kid in theatre. I know everything I need to know to write Emma and Emma’s world in. But before I began my research, I knew comparatively nothing about life in the Elizabethan world. However, I think historical fiction was always something I unconsciously wanted to do – so many times as a kid I would start writing a fantasy story, only to throw it away because it didn’t feel “legitimate” or "real enough." I’m realizing now that I wasn’t satisfied with my writing because it wasn’t backed up by research – and the writing I’m doing now is, and it’s the kind of writing I've been trying to do since I was 10.

            So this is the semi-unconscious process I went through in deciding what to write my Plan about. Other details went into it: a character popped out at me, a thought about a past crush that I wanted to express, the realization that Shakespeare was a historical fiction author himself. All of this went into me walking into T.’s office one morning and saying, “I’ve got an idea.”