“To begin… To begin… How to start? I’m hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee.” This is how the writer Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicholas Cage, in “Adaptation” internally describes the frustration of getting to work.
Inspiration is a funny little thing. It was constantly eluding Charlie Kaufman. He just couldn’t sit down and get the right vision, get himself in the right mood.
All of us have a lot of writing we need to do for our various classes. The middle part of any paper is no sweat. It’s just sitting down and beginning that proves to be so difficult.
Way back in the day I had my first 10 page paper ever due. My high school, while still a good school, was pretty easy on me. Usually I would just hammer out some long-winded and opinionated piece on something like “Last of the Mohicans” and it would easily pass muster. Teachers were just happy that some people in the class could actually string together decent sentences.
Anyway, this paper was going nowhere and desperate times called for desperate measures. I lived in the tiniest of tiny singles way up in the hills of Dolan. So, within those paper-thin walls I locked myself away from the outside world, in a manner of speaking, and set about the task at hand. I had done the research earlier, now it was just the actual writing part.
For the better part of two days I went without a shower and subsisted on peanut-butter sandwiches, lemon-twist Pepsi, and lots and lots of coffee. When it was all said and done my body had been thoroughly punished and my paper really wasn’t all that spectacular. I had procrastinated for two months and my penalty was almost going out of my mind from caginess and caffeine.
What have I learned since then? Not much as I hammer out this article. Our time between the assignment date and the due date just seems to evaporate. If the weekend starts on Thursday and runs through Sunday morning, this leaves us with only three-and-a-half days to get anything done. Sunday afternoon is all about laying out just how many pages we need to read and what is due when. Monday we usually manage to be productive. Tuesday we get a little less done. By the time Wednesday roles around visions of the weekend cloud our minds. After that it’s all down hill.
Parents’ weekend usually involves mom and dad making a trip to the bookstore and buying us another day-organizer or calendar. So, as I and countless others slowly begin to explode from ever increasing stress I think of all the dust that gathers on those organizers. They should just make our lives easier and print after Monday, “Forget about it. It’s just not gonna happen.” They should just ban the damn things outright. All they do, it seems, is point out just how unorganized we actually are.
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