I'm learning that I might have to start working backwards. I've been in contact with the girl who ran the very first Bozeman Monologues a few years ago, and I've been talking to her about production logistics. My Capstone project is slowly evolving (in my mind) into a deconstruction of each Monologue to decipher the writing techniques behind each, and then using those concepts to build research upon to come to a final proposal for writing therapy techniques to be used in the VOICE Center counseling services.
Ideally, I'd like to be able to interview past Monologues writers and performers about their writing process and how they were emotionally affected throughout and after the writing was done. I'm not sure how feasible that is, but I do know I can get in touch with the ones I know (which will also help me plan the production of the Monologues!!), so that might be a nice place to start.
The bulk of my project will just be doing research in order to create the proposal; I have no familiarity with writing as therapy, so I'm going into it basically blind. However, my time spent as a VOICE Center Advocate has taught me how incredibly healthy it is to speak out about a traumatic incident, and I'm hoping that writing will find its place in the discussion and healing that happens in those sessions. It's funny that writing my personal statement helped me solidify all of these different ideas. I learned that I want to study communications because I love connecting with people (duh), but I love working with others to help them achieve a goal. This has also resulted from my time as a Writing Center Tutor, and combining what I'm learning about one on one sessions with clients who are both working on their writing and who are battling the aftermath of a sexual assault has been so fascinating. Dialogue is fascinating. Healing, growing, and learning is fascinating. WRITING is fascinating. So, I want to combine all of that personal knowledge into a well-researched, legitimate proposal.
I guess I'm banking on the fact that because researching the Monologues is infiltrating both my academic and extracurricular work, it will naturally force me to continue to work on it. I'm not sure how to make it a set part of my schedule. Like I said in class, I don't work in time increments, I work in amounts of text, whether that be pages read or words written. I guess for this project, I'll need to think this same way in order to be productive. I'm thinking a combination of a certain amount of words/one article per week that pertains to the proposal? Any work I'm doing in orchestrating the Monologues will be naturally added on to that.
Now as I'm writing this, I keep looking back to Doug's suggestions for this post and reading the word "specifics." Ugh. I feel like as I write, things keep getting more and more broad as I try to imagine work that hasn't actually been done yet. However, I feel like I'm making a personal breakthrough in terms of my own investment in my writing, so there's that. Happy Wednesday from my brain-dead, candy-filled self!
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