The nerd files

An anthology of writing from Goldsmiths.

Do you want to write gay romantic narrative low fantasy/mythology-esque ballad poems??

Apparently I do, and I want to submit them for my next creative writing assignment (which isn't due until mid-February). I know, I know: I'm a nerd. My friends don't stop reminding me of that fact - and that they hate me for having written so much of my dissertation already.

But I digress.

I realised that to take on this project properly, I was going to have to do some serious research on form, other similar work, practice and mythology. What I couldn't do was leave my first draft ideas as they were and change a word or two in each stanza. That might be good for lazy tweaking, but it wasn't going to get me anywhere near a respectable grade.

Like any other respectable writer would in my position, I started with an internet search, closely followed by a library catalogue search. The internet search was to find out any key words that I would need to put in to my catalogue search, as well as to gain a little bit more of a basic understanding of what exactly I wanted to write. The catalogue search quickly became a frustrating process of trial and error, in which I tried to search for a bunch of poets and the catalogue erred in telling me it had no idea what I was talking about.

In the end, we settled our differences and I found a handful of titles that could possibly help, and one book that would not help but seemed like it would be a good read. Which I also decided to read first, because I'm now on break for Christmas and it seemed a waste to begin the holiday by working too hard. The other books I took out were Quartet of Poems and Afro-Greeks*. Before writing this post, I thought I had taken out more than these books but I was wrong. Thinking back, I did pick up two or three more while in the library but after skimming through them, rejected them on the grounds that they bored me to tears. According to the introduction to the introduction (I'm not kidding) of Quartet, the book is arranged "to support my work towards GCSE". Super. Exactly what I was after.

Ha, no, but it is a slim volume which is comforting to me over the Christmas period, as it means I don't have to slog too hard to get through it. Also it's poetry, which by its nature is quite quick to read. The other book, Afro-Greeks, is thicker at 250 pages, and is full of essays rather than poems, but it doesn't look too difficult either. There's a whole chapter dedicated to 'Trinidadian Models of Athenian Democracy', which I'm really looking forward to reading.

I've just got to work myself up into actually doing some constructive work over the holiday period. Which is a mission in itself.