Why I Hate Writing Papers

I'm taking a fifteen-minute break from working on this massive final paper for my Chaucer class. So instead of smoking a cigarette, I'll vent a little, get this off my chest, then dive right back in for several more hours.

I hate writing research papers. I'm a Creative Writing student. I write, surprisingly enough, creatively. I despise, with almost every thread of my being, the whole concept of the Research Paper. It's really a pointless exercise in self-flagellation.

It's pointless because it's never about what you say, but about how you say it. You can get an "A" on a paper by writing 15 pages of the most obvious things about the story you can think of and, if you're a detail person and get the exact right number of sources (who cares what they think, BTW), make sure you're using periods instead of commas on your Works Cited page (you must use proper MLA format, mind you), and express your boring ideas with technical perfection, then you're in!

Who cares if you what you think about the literature is hooey? You expressed yourself with technical proficiency and that's all that matters.

Well guess what, not all of us give a rat's ass about proper MLA format. We don't see the big flippin' difference between 13 and 15 "sources." Some of us could really care less what some anti-social ex-hippie literature professor at Hoo-Haw University has to say on the matter. Nine times out of ten, I just want to learn about the literature. Not what other people say about the literature, but about the literature. And the author. And the author's peers. And the author's world.

But this semester has been all about the critics. What do the critics think? I can't say that I've learned much of anything valuable about Chaucer's work, but I can sure tell you what the critics think about him!

Fat lot of good that'll do me next week, after my final, when I'm staring down the outline of the next four-fifths of my first novel.