The Creative Process

NP: Do You Want To -- Franz Ferdinand

(This is another rambling blog post written in an effort to get my mind sharply focused on writing real stuff)

The swimming in peanut butter analogy that I am just so fond of is only partially right. In the beginning, when the scale and scope of the project is up in the air you do seem hopelessly lost. Once the end is near, it starts to all take focus and before your very eyes you end up with a finished product. I am currently 14 pages from the end of Chapter 8. I have a conclusion to write, but I think I am going to revise 1-8 first and then tack on the end when I know fully what my project says.

The creative process is a wonderful thing because it is so complex and free-floating. The initial dissertation proposal was a far piece away from what it has turned out to be. Over these past months, the ideas and the critical points have shifted to radically different places. The names and the dates are there, but the implications have changed drastically. My perceptions on American politics and the ideas of liberalism and conservatism were wrong, wrong, wrong when I started. Now, I think I'm closer to the truth, and the picture I am painting is sharper, clearer, and more life-like.

The best part of this whole mess is the intellectual growth. I know how to take a set of documents (or many sets from many different archives) and cobble together a story that showed what happened and why those events are important. When I started at Gator U, a very wise professor told me "not to fill a niche," meaning don't write a dissertation on a topic just because no one had done it before. The goal was to find something that can alter our perception of events. While I don't know if I'm going to re-write American political history, I am throwing out some ideas that haven't been discussed in toto before. I'm adding another layer to the rise of the New Right and showing exactly why Goldwater and his supporters were so militant in 1964. The ramifications were, of course, Ronald Reagan (Cue Primal Scream from Josh), but the roots of Goldwaterism were more complex than historians have thought.

In sum, as I am set to graduate in August, I have learned what I came here to do. The switch has flipped from "graduate student" to "historian." Once I get a job, we can put "professional" in front of historian, but until then (and until the Office Depot savings runs out), I'm quite content to know that I got what I came here for.