Alternative

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Did I learn enough about the NFL draft to write six hundred words about it, or find enough interest?

Well I could probably write six hundred words about a piece of gravel if I really had to, they just might not be the best six hundred words or the most engaging ever to write.

I don’t mean to say that I’m especially inventive, more that I’m especially wordy and long-winded, and can go on spinning out words for a while before my hands on the keyboard catch up to the fact that I’m quite out of things to say.

Anyway, I learned some valuable things from this first step I think: first and foremost, doing research on a topic that doesn’t interest you feels absolutely pointless, even when you have the stated goal of learning whatever you can.

I picked the NFL draft because it’s a topic that I had a reasonable amount of familiarity with it, but almost no practical information about, and most significantly, had no reason to acquire any information about, now or in the future.

It is not a useful topic for me to acquire information about, or at least that’s how it felt going in.

How does it feel now that I did admittedly the bare minimum of research possible on the subject and am moving on?

About the same, actually -- I found some facts that I could interpret as being interesting, but I honestly think I might be getting confused between being interested in the facts and being interested in my own interpretation of them.

In other words, interested in hearing my own fingers type and not much else.

I still believe that there’s use in trying to learn about a subject you wouldn’t normally be inclined to go out and learn about on your own -- otherwise, if people just stuck to learning more and more about the same things, there would be nothing much new to speak of in the world, creatively or otherwise, just stagnation everywhere.

Mark Twain once said that a classic is a book that people praise without reading.  In a speech he said famously of Paradise Lost (or Paradiſe Loſt for those playing along at home in the 16^th century) that it fulfills a certain criteria for a classic:

“I don't believe any of you have ever read PARADISE LOST, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic, just as Professor Winchester says, and it meets his definition of a classic -- something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."  

- "The Disappearance of Literature" speech, 20 November 1900 

Note: Professor Winchester was Caleb Thomas Winchester (1847-1920), librarian of Connecticut Wesleyan University from 1869 - 1885 and Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature there from 1873 - 1920.

borrowed with thanks from twainquotes.com 

I’m not sure if I heard that entire quote once before or only heard it paraphrased, but the key passage, that everybody wants the experience gained by, or at least the credit for, reading something that has a reputation for being a great work of literature, but the strong preference would be to get it without having to actually take the time and effort to go through with actually reading the thing.  (See? Wordy.)  (I first typed that accidentally as “Wee? Sordy.” and giggled like the child I am.)

I was thinking about that quote after writing the post that went up yesterday, and thinking about how I may have been too broad when I set out to classify topics of possible research into the two categories of “things that interest me” and “things that do not.”

I also still believe that if I research and write about only those things that do strongly interest me, I will eventually get just as burnt out and done with this whole thing as if I researched only things that held no interest for me whatever.

Hopefully it’s fairly clear where I’m going with this: since the moment I sat down and realized I really was going to have to find a way to do actual research and then write about the NFL draft, I’ve been struggling to find a way to weasel out of the promise I made to me to try and challenge my creative side to deal with things it wouldn’t normally deal with.

I’m wondering now if there’s a useful way to do that weaseling, or if I should just try and do better at picking un-interesting subjects that are still a little bit interesting somehow, perhaps as if they were in disguise.