Ten minutes: Beginning thoughts

[greybeta]

Okay, I mentioned previously that I wanted to write a book for my senior honors project. That's a pretty lofty goal. Nonetheless, I feel confident that I will be able to do it.

As some of you may have noticed, I have a slight problem with procrastination. My junior honors colloquium instructor suggested a strategy to overcome this. Spend at least ten minutes a day thinking about your project. It doesn't always have to be grunt work, just thinking about it. You see, the problem most people get into is thinking that they need a huge block of time to do a gargantuan task like an honors project. That block of time never comes. That is because if you free up time to work on it, something else will rush in and fill its place. Instead, by thinking about it at least ten minutes a day, you get over that hump because you are gradually advancing.

Well, I'm addicted to LJ and xanga so I might as well use that to my advantage. Yes, this means I'll try to spend part of my time here thinking about my senior honors project. Let me sum up what I know so far. I want to collect a bunch of stories involving the journey from Vietnam to America. I want to include at least twelve stories. I'm not sure what I want to focus on yet, but I do know that I want to try to capture the drama and emotion of the journey. Plenty has been written about the reasons.

Now a book on the journeys wouldn't be anything new. Life changing events such as those have been recorded by those who have lived through those troubling times. Ah, but I'm a second generation kid, which means I'm a bit removed from the emotionality of those times. I don't quite understand the passion behind the hatred of Communists or the sincere gratefulness that a lot of Vietnam War refugees have for great opportunity in America. I believe a look from the perspective of a second generation kid would be a rather good twist on things.

Of course, you shouldn't ask others to do what you aren't willing to do yourself. Fortunately, my parents have agreed to record their story first. I've been told their story, but not in detail. It's not exactly something that you bring up at the dinner table. So it's going to be a growing experience for my family as well.

The biggest problem is going to be translating people's stories into English. Quite a few people would write their story, but only in their native language. My grasp of Vietnamese, unfortunately, is piss poor. Well, I exaggerate but it's definitely not going to be good enough to do it by myself. I'm going to have to rely on my parents to help me translate things. I'm sure I'm going to run into the things that a tricky translation (but I promise to be better than the ones you see in martial arts movies).

Then, there's always the writing limitation factor. How much will I be able to write before I burn out? I don't know, it just seems that there a lot of writers who never finish that novel they want to write. I suppose I have it a bit easier since I'm not actually coming up with the bulk of the writing on my own.

I need to do some researching about oral history and interviewing for it from now until spring break. I don't plan on doing any heavy lifting on this until after then because I still have to work on getting a presentation ready for a conference over spring break plus I have to play my part in the allocations of my student government.

Comments

[aritei.livejournal.com]

I've written LJ entries on both my grandmothers and a bit about my parents. It's easiest to do it in bursts at a time, just after someone gets in the storytelling mood. Too bad your time is so limited! It would be interesting to see a book someday though! :)

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

O Muse, tell me the stories...

[correspondguy.livejournal.com]

Try Studs Terkel. He invented the damn stuff.

I wrote a 204 page paper for my BA (okay, it did have big margins - they bound it) - I spent a semester hanging around researching and not writing, and then crammed the writing into the second semester. I wrote the thing longhand and then transcribed it, and the way I got it done was not leaving the library until I'd written at least four pages, counting the front and back as one page. When I finished a chapter, I'd type it.

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll look into him.

204 page paper? Wow. We'll see if I can approach the 150 page mark.

[kidsis.livejournal.com]

ever thought of just sound recording the stories as they tell them, then typing up a transcript of the story? It might save you a step or two when it came time to re-write for the finished paper.

of course, as a person who can barely handwrite or type, I'd think of this as a wonderful timesaver.

Just a thought....

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

I am thinking about recording the stories, even though that would require a good deal of effort in transcribing them...plus translation. But I believe that's the way to go in oral interviews. I also think I am going to do a mix of email (look maw, story already transcribed) and recordings.

[kidsis.livejournal.com]

Ahh, email. That even more of a lazy way to go ;)

[iceofpluto.livejournal.com]

Sorry, but this isn't really on what you talked about, even though this book sounds like an awsome story.

It's about Megatokyo, I got your comment in my email, but it messes up when I try to respond from there, and then the orginal post I commented in about it a few pages back in my friends list... Anyway, SD all the way. I try to stay away from MTCentral. It's full of crazy people. Most of which don't even read the comic... So yeah. I'd keep lurking, learn what to stay away from and what's ok. Otherwise you'll proly get flamed. Or invoke the drinking game. Either way, you look like a real chump. I usally only comment about the comic. I'm sure you've noticed that Piro (Fred) posts after he's brought up the new comic. Anyway, yeah, good luck.

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

Thanks. It'll be awhile before I post on the MT forums.

[fub.livejournal.com]

You procastinate because you're intimidated by the work ahead of you. The fix is obvious: break it into smaller parts.
I have gotten tremendous use out of Dave Allen's Getting Things Done. It basicalle boils down to this:

- Make use of 'distributed cognition'. Write things down when you have a good idea. If it's written down where you will be sure to look at it later, you don't have to worry about it now.
- Make decisions on which projects you want to complete now and which projects you want to postpone.
- For each project that you want to finish within the foreseeable future, identify the 'next steps'. A Next Step is a physical action that you can undertake to bring a project closer to completion. A project may have more than one Next Step, or it may have none at the moment (if you're waiting for someone to give you input on something, for instance).
- Write down all the Next Steps. Start each step with a verb -- this will keep you honest in defining clear, physical actions.
- Do not prioritise you list of Next Steps!

Now, whenever you have time to work on your projects, look at your lists of Next Steps. Choose an action that you have the time and energy for at that moment. Undertake that action.

The trick is not to prioritise. because you can't do anything with priority 'B' until you've ticked off everything with priority 'A', right? However, if all your A-priority tasks take too long or demand too much energy than you have available at this moment, you start to procastinate -- because you feel you can't tackle the A-tasks.

It works. At least, it works for me. I must admit I don't follow the system as closely as I maybe should, but the simple technique of identifying Next Steps and not prioritising has made me so much more productive. It might just work for you too.

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

Interesting strategy. I might just have to try this.