Page Ten is Rad

I have just started writing my fourth of five chapters (not including the introduction and conclusion), and this is the first one where I have already done a lot of the thinking. Normally, I do a lot of reading and note-taking before I sit down to outline and write, but this time I'm writing about something I've already written about before. So, I've started by writing for a while, and I'll tackle some new readings next week. It is a really fun experience to sit down and know where I want to go in much greater detail than I normally do when I begin to work on a new chapter. In this case, I wrote term papers on Wulfstan for two different committee members, and after producing seven pages of outline for my chapter, I have started revisiting those papers and reminding myself of the some of the details I don't want to forget to deal with in the chapter. So, I admit that my increase to ten pages has been greatly facilitated by that earlier work, but I always like page ten. It gives a comforting little box to tick off in the march towards a chapter, and it's a place where I can see the chapter waving back at me. I especially like it when most of the document is still outline because then I know that I've got enough material for the whole chapter under glass, and all I have to do is start filling in my outline. This approach allows me to attack the chapter piecemeal, in whatever areas I'm thinking about on a particular day, and since I've already slotted those areas into the overarching structure of the chapter (at least as I anticipate it), I can tell roughly to what I need to connect my piecemeal compositions.

Thoughts to which this leads me, hastily noted down because I'm hungry and want to start my next lunch-book, having completed my last one yesterday:

* There's a good, long history of using a track or trail as a metaphor for gaining knowledge (following in people's tracks, etc.), but I was just rereading yesterday some stuff about Alfred's specific use of the metaphor of a hunt. I suppose that I have just characterized my chapter outlining as a hunt, at the end of which I have pounced on the material and put it "under glass."

* I suddenly have a vision of what could be very satisfying about being a grown-up academic who has done this long enough to have ideas already floating around, ready to be followed up when the opportunity arises. My goodness, does this mean that there might come a time when I feel only minorly incompetent? What a thought.

* I really enjoy writing about Wulfstan, and so the challenge of this chapter is going to lie in making the connection to the rest of my dissertation, figuring out how to balance all of the other things I want to say about Wulfstan and about CCCC 201 with my larger dissertation argument about linguistic difference and manuscripts that invite later engagement.

* The other difficult thing will be to make sure that it goes from being a chapter about (Ælfric and) Wulfstan to being a chapter about Ælfric and Wulfstan.