Victory Yoghurt

The dissertation. It’s done. It’s in. For better or for worse, it is over.

So how was it?

Well now, that’s a very broad question. Firstly, I should address what my dissertation even was. I’m a Creative Writing student, so my dissertation was essentially to take everything that I’d learned and write an 8,000 word piece of fiction to hand in, alongside a 2,000 word critical commentary. At the beginning of the course, this sounded very appetizing. “We can write whatever we want!” I probably exclaimed. “Piece of cake!”

And unless I was talking about a cake made out of obsidian, then I was wrong.Whilst the prospect of writing 8,000 fictional words may sound promising when you have dozens of half-baked ideas swirling around your head, the time of actually choosing what story to write for your magnum opus becomes a little trickier. Suddenly all of those ideas are awful or previously used, and you’re left stranded in the dark with nothing but a vague “Write a good story!” to go off of.

I ended up writing a thriller piece named Rerouted, which I shan’t discuss too much here. Let’s just say that the narrative was experimental and focused on perspective, which is a key interest of mine. As a story in itself, I think it turned out alright. I’d happily return to it and tweak it a bit and include it in a collection of short stories someday. But a magnum opus it was not. In my opinion, it failed to delve as deeply into the fascinating possibility of perspective as it could, and the entire time I was writing the thing I had doubts about the actual message that the narrative would deliver by the end. It was not the intended conglomeration of writing skills and abilities I’d picked up over the previous semesters. It is merely, at best, a decent story with an interesting narrative perspective.

The critical commentary was worse though. For those of you who don’t know, a critical commentary is a creative writer’s chance to write academically about their own work, to prove that it reflects what they’ve learned in the module and that their fictional imaginings have merit as coursework by showing how it’s been influenced by the works they’ve studied. Of course, with the dissertation there were no set texts, merely a vague pointing towards the potential topics from previous modules. With this in mind, I focused on a text we’d studied last semester which had inspired my narrative style, and essentially tunnel-visioned it. By the end of my critical commentary I’d put almost no critical theory into the thing and had left little room in my argument for it, and by this point the deadline was fast approaching.

As a famous, lovable yellow bear once said, “Oh bother.”

So all of this has led to me frantically polishing and re-writing sections of my critical commentary, before handing in what will inevitably fall short of the grade I’ll desperately need if I’m to achieve a 2:1 in my university course overall. This did, you might imagine, leave me in a bit of an emotional slump, until I made a totally lighthearted Facebook post essentially daring anyone to be disappointed in me and was instead met with widespread support. Not only that, but we were gifted with frozen yoghurt upon handing in our dissertations. Frozen yoghurt! Who can stay upset when your university gives you frozen yoghurt? I might be dwelling a little too long on the frozen yoghurt. Let’s move on.

So why bother to make a public blog post to tell everyone about my marvelous underachievement? Well, personally, I believe that an honest assessment of one’s shortcomings is a healthy way to deal with such shortcomings. But if you want complete honesty, well, this dissertation has been practically my life for the past few weeks and so I have essentially nothing else to write about. In fact, I have more deadlines coming up! So that’s fine. I’d better run and start making with the fiction.

I wonder if they’ll have more frozen yoghurt on results day.

Actually, I’d better not think about results day.