for the love of language.

So.....maybe I've been in the sciences too long, where written brevity is rewarded and concise is the name of the game in papers and theses. I've been reading A LOT lately - which is great, I love reading and could do it all day, every day - but it's shown me that there is a huge difference in the way I learn and the way my brain works in each subject. It was the black-or-white, right-or-wrong dichotomies that drew me to science - counseling was too "messy", I brought it home with me. Science either proved something or it didn't. But English and writing....language is caressed, turned over in the synapses and rearranged on the tongue. Analyzation and obsession over the right words or the right feeling are the norm, and while every writer seeks to "tighten up" pieces of writing, it is not as stringent and sparse as the sciences. After years and years of adapting my writing to APA and AMA style, I may need to re-evaluate.

I was reading this blog, by one of the main contributors of the MFA Blog (which every applicant checks a billion times a day), and I found my brain becoming exhausted. Am I really so used to the journal format of: hypothesis, methods, results, discussion? Maybe I am just out of practice with the mental challenge of it all - science is challenging in a different way than language is; I can't explain it well. He keeps mentioning Art. Funny, I never think of writing as Art....but writing programs are often housed in Schools of Art. Writers are seen as artists. Yet I sort of recoil at the thought of being called an artist. I don't feel creative enough. I've fought so hard over the past 6 years to be seen and respected as a no-nonsense, scientific, cerebral person, and being an artist seems so foreign to me. It's weird, right? It sort of requires a paradigm shift.

When I go up North next week, I know I have a Virginia Woolf book and Joan Didion's nonfiction collection waiting for me in my room at my mom's house, as well as my Manual of Sports Medicine that I got for my birthday. I'm still working on Wharton and Steinbeck here, as well as slogging through Franzen's "The Corrections"...am I a traitor to the writing world if I say I find Franzen (and Eggers) kind of pretentious?

I remember reading Joyce's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" as an entering freshman in high school, and Carson McCullers' novels for a research paper sophomore year, and being awed at their writing. I feel that way about Didion's writing. Maybe one day someone will say that about my writing.