The Trouble Of Self-Study

My blockmate shook his head. “I wrote my college essays,” he said, remembering, “And then I went back and read them again…and they just made me hate myself.” We sat in front of my computer, gazing at my sister’s common-app essay. She had sent it to me for a final proofread, and I had fetched my blockmate from next door to get a second opinion. At the moment, however, both of us were far more absorbed in mentally scrolling through our own compositions, now relics of high school memory.

“It was like: ‘I write fiction,’” he said, in the all-purpose voice he uses to mock everyone from himself to President Bush. “‘I view the world through fiction… I am a vessel…’” We laughed. My laugh was a little uneasy, though, because he had touched on part of my identity; I’m a creative writing student, and (try as I might) I don’t always find that so funny.

Attempts at creative writing involve many time-honored traditions: staring at blank sheets of paper (blank virtual sheets of paper, these days); typing out a few tentative words, only to cringe and toss them away; getting angry at people who read the final draft and don’t sense all the brilliant, subtly wrought miracles of language. Ever since that conversation with my blockmate, though, I’ve begun to notice another quality of the writing process that I hadn’t really considered: unabashed navel-gazing.

Writing a story, or a newspaper column—to some extent, any creative effort—is a solitary practice, an attempt to take an internal impression and document it. Regardless of the subject—ourselves, our families, strangers, nature—the process of creating turns our focus relentlessly inward: to pinpoint, as precisely as possible, the dimensions of this impression, the color and the shape, so that we can faithfully reproduce it and our creations ring true. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that all this time I’ve spent staring at my computer screen, trying to coax unwieldy words into delicate prose, all amounted to variations on the same masturbatory activity: finding different ways to focus on myself, to fall further and further into an internal world. I began to feel claustrophobic and slightly bloated. I began to look with new regard at my friends concentrating in various social sciences—government, economics, cultural this and that…were their studies not focused refreshingly outward, broadly and generously?

There is, of course, a communicative element to creative work: when we have finished our stories or columns (or paintings or songs), we send them to The Crimson, hang them on the wall, recite them out loud, so that our creations, our documented impressions, can become shared experiences. Even so, the ability to communicate rests more on the works themselves than with the effort that we put into them. Whether one of my written pieces delivers meaning concerns the piece itself, not all the work I employ in finding a message and trying to express it. I’m still left looking inward, studying myself.

But then I reconsidered my friends, whose studies had seemed so broad and outward: my female acquaintances in Women’s Studies, my friend from Mexico who studies Latin America, my old hallmate, an aspiring entrepreneur, who majors in Economics. To some degree, each of us studies ourselves, tailors our class schedule so that we can explore some facet of our culture, our background, our identities—both present and future.

Perhaps, to varying degrees, this is indeed egotism. But perhaps this inward focus is also an integral part of what we are supposed to do in college: ground our identities firmly, so that we can recognize where we end, where the world begins, and how we and the world are connected. Perhaps my creative writing can be an exercise in navel-gazing—but the creative process, like our studies, can be self-orientation as well as self-study: not only a means of expression, but also a way of fitting ourselves into a larger system. If these two things are kept balanced as I write, then I feel much less danger of slipping into a completely self-absorbed gaze. My work takes shape not merely as a creation, but also—hopefully—as a contribution.

I saw my sister again when I went home for Thanksgiving. Once we had caught up on hometown gossip, we chatted a bit about college essays. As we talked, I remembered what one of my old writing teachers had said about application essays: “They’re essentially a good work of fiction.” Cynicism aside—he was talking more about flow and style than about fabrication—my teacher’s approach seems to be the difference between self-study as a way of expanding our views, and self-study that threatens to swallow us (the kind of writing that my blockmate had ridiculed). That is, if I am going to spend my time stringing words together, I hope that these strings become the ties that bind, not constrict.

Catherine L. Tung ’06 is an English concentrator in Pforzheimer House. Her column appears on alternate Mondays.