This week I’m exhausted.
I have a three-to-five-page, single-spaced(!) essay and a presentation on 1 Corinthians both due Tuesday in my New Testament class, a three-to-five-page, double-spaced draft of an essay on exiled Iraqi poets due Monday in my Honors Thought class, a presentation and a final draft on the Iraqi poets due Friday and a new short story due Tuesday. This new short story is supposed to “extend,” to go beyond the relatively simple one-scene stories we just did. Dr. Bailey encouraged us to “be ambitious with this one.”So I am. In the midst of all this work (I’m not going to know what to do with myself next Friday afternoon after everything’s turned in), I’m writing a short story set in 1937 that will be told from two different first-person perspectives. The characters are based on two musicians I studied in my Jazz History class here at SU: Artie Shaw, the first white bandleader to hire a black singer, and Billie Holiday, the first black singer to perform with an all-white band.
I'm in over my head. Since I never actually experienced the year 1937, this story requires about as much research as my Honors Thought essay on Iraqi poetry. It's all the small things that trip me up. What did the dance halls and clubs look like? Where did bands rehearse? What songs were popular? How did people talk?
That’s not to say I don’t find the research interesting. I love jazz music. The problem is, whenever I sit down to write this thing, I always spend more time digging through Wikipedia for background information than I do actually “hammering the keys” (Tom Bailey’s prescription for writer’s block, something he doesn’t believe in). It’s just difficult to write about a real place that you’ve never experienced and still make it feel real.
