Losing Passion for Writing

I sometimes feel like I’ve spent the last few years of my life writing about nonsense that doesn’t matter in the end. Research paper after research paper. Who besides my professor is going to give a damn about my paper on a villainess in an 18th century British novel? Does the following make you quiver in excitement:

Frances Burney creates many villainous and repellant characters in Evelina: Sir John Belmont, Captain Mirvan, Mr. Lovel, Sir Clement Willoughby, and Lady Louisa Larpent, but it is Madame Duval who emerges as the most hated character. The narrative continually abuses and humiliates her while the other characters save for Mr. Lovel emerge unscathed. Sir Clement Willoughby kidnaps Evelina, Captain Mirvan is a bully who delights in humiliating Madame Duval, terrorising his wife and daughter, and causing general mayhem, and Sir John Belmont abandons the mothers of both his children, but Madame Duval commits an unforgivable crime by being a lower class woman pretending to be a French aristocrat. The men can cheat, abuse, rob, kidnap, abandon children and mothers, but Madame Duval does not know her true place in society so she must be punished and contained within the narrative.

I thought not. Yet most of my energy is spent writing these sorts of papers. I enjoy some of them, but what is it going to get me? What will I get out of graduate school? Is it going to make me a better writer? Hardly. It’s made me a worse writer. I spend my time figuring out ways to do very little for that A. I usually wait until the last minute to write my 20 page research papers, and sometimes, I just use a paper I’ve already written, and I spruce it up for the current class. Graduate school has made me dread writing. I don’t have the passion for it that I once did. I envy those bloggers who can write 10 to 15 pages at a time. Writing has been a chore for the last few years that there is little joy anymore. I enjoy posting film reviews, and I sometimes enjoy ranting on topics of sexuality, but I wish I could recapture my love of writing. 

I miss being passionate about writing poetry or the soap opera I started writing in seventh grade. Only my sister read it, but it felt so good to create characters and plots. Not the same anymore. I must write a one page response paper every Monday; a 20 page seminar paper; 2 8 page papers, an annotated bibliography, a case study of a scholarly article. I do my damndest to put as little effort in as possible. I go to class and I dread every second of my Monday Melville class. I have no interest in Melville. Not even a chapter about sperm and circle jerking could interest me much. I have to write my response paper on a book I haven’t even opened up, and it’s due by Monday afternoon. And the thing is: I don’t care. As for this blog entry,