Promise…. BENT… OH Look an ESSAY!
So, last week I did promise to make an effort to get on track with my writing, and I am most definitely making some progress. I have written two of my Sunday posts for this site, wrote up the new game that happened this Saturday night, and have been working on editing a book for a friend.
I still need more time to get back into writing my WIP and getting regular writing hours going again. As such I NEED to finish the editing on my friend’s novel, BEFORE my classes start on the 27th and to that end you will notice that today I have posted yet another Essay from my classes. More on that in a little bit.
The Game Plan
So, with my masters classes starting up I WILL be making time for regular writing again, mostly because my degree will actually require me to write a LOT… matter of fact my classes are meant to help me finish my WIP… accept that my WIP is planned as a massive 150-200k Epic Fantasy… and my classes are aimed at me writing a lovely 80k novel… so there is a very real possibility that I will be asked to work on a different novel… and here is where we come across one of my current weaknesses (it seems when it comes to writing my weaknesses change every few years… I should talk more about that….?)
FOCUS: My current weakness is that I am kind of obsessed with writing this book, in THIS world… and I have been hyper focused on the previous book (trunked) in this world and then skipping the middle book to get to this one… for like 10 years… I know, its crazy. I have worked on almost nothing else and my ideas are not coming as fluidly as they normally do because of it. So, I have to make myself ready to write a completely different novel in the same world… because I think that is my only answer. To that end I WILL be looking at my world building and I WILL be looking to outline more books in the world.
I know, I KNOW!
Yes… I’m totally going against a bunch of my previous posts. Posts where I clearly mentioned that I have World Builder’s Syndrome and that I spend lots of time working on story-adjacent things but not writing the actual story. I know. I’m being a huge hypocrite and breaking down right in front of my handful of readers. But look, I still intend to post progress reports each week here on the blog, I plan to show that what I’m working on still has value, EVEN IF WE ALL KNOW THAT WRITING THE NOVEL IS THE KEY THING!
I will still try to hold myself accountable. Pretty much I will be sharing the classes and my writing experience here for the next couple years, because that’s how long the classes are and how long it will probably take me to get this book going. Maybe I can see if I can get my thesis approved early (aka approve of my over-ambitious novel) and as such I can get the writing going again. Either way, I am looking to add more structure to my life and put in dedicated writing time and I want to take you all with my on this journey.
Sound fun?
That “Current Weakness” thing:
So, as far as I have been able to learn in my studies all writers have a weakness. Something they find hard to do and they work at, now I have mentioned in many of my posts that I have gone through cycles where I stop writing for years and then come back to it. Going all the way back for nearly thirty years, probably only 14 of them have been dedicated to passionate writing. The thing is when I like at these different eras of my writing, I seem to have different weaknesses.
As a teen I would write stories that were sparse on detail and just zipped along from scene to scene. My weakness was in setting the scene and pacing the story BUT my strength was pantsing GREAT foreshadowing and symbolism right in the rough draft. Fast forward a few years and my descriptions and the depth of my characters has become superb but my dialogue is weak as hell.
Now more recently I have had people praise my dialogue but I’m back to pacing issues. It’s a very weird thing and I would love to know if other writers have found that they have changing issues like this. I have some friends who talk about how their very first stuff is unreadable, and yet I can sometimes go back and read something I wrote in my teens and see it needs work but I sometimes surprise myself with how interesting or visceral it is. Then I read something from my 20s and it’s actually worse than my teens. It’s very weird.
Back on Topic
So last week this was my list:
Write Up Torg Game for this Saturday (Aylse Act 10)-50% compete- Write Chap 7 of WIP.
Edit friends Book (12 chapters done)Write Torg Sunday Post (Act 5 part 2)That should be Act 5 FINAL.- Write Next Wednesday Writing Post
3 out of 5 isn’t that bad. I’m half writing a Wednesday post now; you’re just getting an Essay as extra as I feel I’ve been very short of late. I can update that with I started TORG Act 6, so here is the new list for me to finish:
- TORG
Act 6 part 1
- Edit Friends Book (Currently on chap 35 half way thru)
- Write a Wednesday Post
- Work on a possible new novel idea
- Outline the next 5 chap of current WIP.
- Write my introductions to my Masters Classes (2 essays).
The Essay:
I had to skip Term 3 as the only papers written in there were apparently journal entries and most of those are first person stream of conscious, but they’re answering specific questions or referencing articles I don’t have links to anymore. So they would not make interesting reading… well one of those classes was my first writing workshop so there is some interesting character building.
But I digress.
This essay comes from my 4th term of my Bachelors. Now I took a Shakespeare class in my second term and in my 4th I took a class on English Renaissance and Reformation Literature… so of course it meant more Shakespeare. I got to read Hamlet and wrote an essay about whether he was really insane or just faking it. I think I might have let some of my Shakespeare disdain come through on this one, it’s a very short essay as it was only a minor grade for the class and not a large “final” project like the last Essay post.
I hope you enjoy it, it earned me an A.
Hamlet: Insane or not Insane, that is the Question.
So much can and has been said about Hamlet, the play and the character both, and this paper will examine one of the more prolific topics. Is Hamlet in fact insane, or is he merely acting out a convoluted and unnecessary plan? As this is a Shakespeare play the latter is for certain, as pretty much all of his protagonists go overboard with their plans/ solutions. From jealous racist Iago setting up Othello to murder his own wife, to Romeo and Juliet planning a murder suicide instead of admitting their love and possibly uniting the families, or to Twelfth Night were a woman decides to dress as her dead twin brother and live as a man. Shakespeare’s characters have a habit of picking the worse answers to their problems and doggedly pursuing them.
Argument for Sound Mind and Reasoning
So on to Hamlet, a young prince who was been called home from university, months after his father’s death. Place the stress on the months. Now the length of travel time from university to Elsinore is never made known to the reader, suffice it does not take months for a letter to reach the school nor for Hamlet to then return to the castle. So we start the play with one slight against Hamlet, they delayed in telling him of his father’s death. When he returns to Elsinore it is to find that his mother has remarried the King’s brother, Claudius, and placed him on the throne. Slight number two and three, the cavalier attitude of Claudius and Gertrude and the fact that Hamlet’s birthright has been usurped, further pushes the Prince to despondency. Hamlet’s grief is real, he wears mourning black and after having his meeting with the King and Queen, both of whom tell him he should cheer up, wear brighter clothes, be nicer to Claudius, and get over his father’s death already. “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?/ Not so, my lord; I am too much I’th’sun./ Good Hamlet, cast they knighted colour off,/ And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark./ Do not for ever with thy vailed lids/ Seek for thy noble father in the dust;/ Thou know’st ‘tis common,–all that live must die,/ Passing through nature to eternity.” (I.II.66-73). At this point Hamlet’s emotional state is frail, weakened in the extreme and it is less than sixty lines later that he is contemplating suicide for the first time in the play. “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,/ Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!/ Or that the Everlasting had not fixt/ His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!” (I.II.129-32) This is the point when Hamlet is tittering on the edge, he is ready to seriously think about ending his life. He curses his mother and whatever drove her to remarry, and steal his birthright. A birthright that is never addressed in the play itself, not a single mention of Claudius taking the throne by marrying his brother’s widow. Hamlet is friends with several soldiers and is dating Ophelia, the Chamberlain’s daughter; you would think some mention of Claudius seizing the throne would happen, even if just a sly rumor or a remark, but there is none. But to steer back to topic, Hamlet is in a weak state at this moment, and this is when he is told about the ghost.
And Bloody Ghosts…
The ghost of his dead father who can’t rest until his murder is revealed. Hamlet accepts this ghost as a real event, he does question whether it speaks true or not, and this is important for the next bit. This is the point that Hamlet slips from grief stricken into the early stages of madness. Here he allows the merest sliver of madness to crack his psyche and he comes up with his plan to act even more insane. Now most readers will argue that he’s sane at this point for two reasons, first is that he clearly tells the men with him that he is going to act out and be weird and that he wants them to play along, so therefore he has forethought and planning (or at least what passes as planning to a Shakespearean protagonist). Second, he often throughout the next scenes reasons that he needs proof of Claudius’ guilt, and proving the Ghost’s accusations. If he is reasonable enough to need proof then he is of sound mind, the other readers would say. But back to the start, ‘a sliver of insanity cracks his psyche’. While he is indeed struggling to prove the ghost true, he still believes in the ghost, he has accepted the unacceptable. The sliver is slow in destroying his emotional stability, but it is very clear as he acts more and more outrageous through the play. His actions drive Ophelia to madness, in countering Claudius’ plan to ship him off to war and have him murdered he has two other soldiers assassinated, he murders Ophelia’s father, he physically and emotionally attacks his mother. In short, he deteriorates rapidly up until the end, where only the shock of coming on Ophelia’s burial does he shock himself into a state of sober recognition for what he’s done and how he has done it. This culminates in the duel and everyone pretty much dying.
This really was my concluding paragraph… sigh… even I found this one abrupt.
So, Hamlet is a young, emotionally immature individual to begin with, who when confronted with his father’s death and what he perceives to be as emotionally wrong parenting (his mother remarrying in only months, and telling him to get over his father’s death), sets him to contemplating suicide. Then he is confronted with a ghost demanding vengeance. It is very easy to see the cracks in the outer shell, and the rapid onset of the rot within. Maybe Claudius seized the throne because he knew that Hamlet couldn’t rule due to his immaturity and the ghost isn’t real and the previous king wasn’t murdered? It changes the entire play if you look at it as Claudius trying to do what’s best for Denmark and perhaps Gertrude is an emotionally fragile person who just needs to be with someone. Who knows, maybe Gertrude and Claudius had a thing in the past but her parents arranged for her to marry the King instead, we aren’t privy to their pasts.
Work Cited
Shakespeare, William. Complete Plays. Fall River Press. 2012.