I really wish I had something interesting and intellectually stimulating to say today, but…I just don’t.

Maybe I’ve been too ambitious about this whole NaBloPoMo thing—not ambitious as regards the frequency of my updates, but rather as regards the scope. Blogging every day doesn’t necessarily mean writing a tome every day, it just means posting something every day. But for whatever reason, I’ve felt like it was a cop-out to just post a link or a one-line blurb and consider my job done for the day. So I’ve made a real effort to post more substantial pieces of writing every day over the past month.

As I’ve said before, this hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be. The blog is called Wordridden, after all; brevity has never been my strong point. But tonight I feel too tense and unfocused and uninspired to write anything that makes any sense. I’ve been fretting for hours, trying to come up with something, anything to write about, and I’m at a loss. I’ve been feeling like a columnist with a deadline rapidly approaching and an editor breathing down her neck, or like a student pulling an all-nighter, with a paper to write and no good arguments to make.

Actually, as I wrote that last paragraph, I suddenly remembered just such a situation when I was at Mount Holyoke. I was a terrible procrastinator as an undergrad; all of my papers were written at the last minute, usually during late- or all-nighters involving lots of coffee and ramen noodles (of course). Even though this was stressful, I always knew I would get the work done on time, because I always knew what I needed to write about—the problem was just sitting down and getting it done.

But one night I had to write a paper about Tristan and Iseult for my medieval lit class, and I could not for the life of me think of a single thing to write. Nothing. Nada. I remember sitting and squirming in front of my word processor for hours, the cursor blinking balefully, my mind a blank. As night marched on towards dawn, I got more and more agitated as I faced the possibility that this time, for the first time, I might not pull it off—I might not get the paper done after all.

Finally, at 4 a.m., I had a brainstorm and decided to write about the period Tristan and Iseult spend in the forest of Morois, and how the forest allows them to descend into anarchy because it’s a place outside of society, and almost outside of reality. I really felt like I was grasping at straws, but I got the paper done on time and got a good grade, so there you go.

And several years later, when I was taking another medieval lit course in Germany, I learned that the forest is a very common motif in romance literature (courtly romance, that is), and it represents precisely what I thought it did: mystery and adventure, danger and freedom. It’s where knights are tested and illicit lovers can consummate their passion, because the normal rules of society and chivalry don’t apply. There’s even been an entire scholarly book written on the subject, The Forest of Medieval Romance by Corinne J. Saunders (a review of the book can be found here from The Medieval Review ).

So I guess agonizing over something to write can pay off in the end. If you keep at it, you’re bound to stumble onto something. Tonight I started off writing about not having anything to write about, and I ended up writing about the motif of the forest in medieval literature. My deadline has been met, my paper can be handed in on time. Phew.