I can’t believe I arrived in Edinburgh three months and three days ago. It feels like ages ago, and also like I just got here, like, yesterday. This semester has been stressful, forcing me to confront bad habits that I’ve had since my undergrad days, but has also expanded my understanding of storytelling; its ubiquity, its possibilities, and its importance. While I do have my gripes about the last three months, I can’t deny that I’ve enjoyed myself immensely. Every course I’ve taken has offered new perspectives and taught me something unexpected, and while I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on any of them, I could still cry over all the amazing courses that I didn’t get to take.
Month: December 2023
Writing Speculative Fiction was my last intensive of the first semester and one that I most expected to be on familiar ground with. Writing courses were my bread and butter during undergrad, and the intensive reminded me of how much I enjoy workshopping and why I got started getting writing degrees in the first place.
I’m not actually much of a gamer. I’ve been playing Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery pretty steadily for the last five years and am up to level 3549 on Candy Crush, but my last time playing an actual video game was several years ago. I took Gamifying Historical Narratives out of sheer interest – because I know plenty of gamers who would have loved a course like this, and it seemed like an unusual approach to storytelling that I don’t have much experience with.
Narrative and Computational Text Analysis was one of the intensives I was most excited for, and it certainly taught me a lot. I could probably write entire blogposts on every section of the course, but I’ll stick to things I consider to be relevant to my final project:
In week 4, as yet another week passed by without an intensive and some of my peers were saying they’d already had all of theirs, we began groupwork in Interdisciplinary Futures. My group was a good mix of disciplines – myself with Creative Writing and, after considering my Intellectual Autobiography for a while, Sustainability; and the others with International Relations, Education, and History.
I like working on my own. That’s due to a couple of reasons:
1) I haven’t necessarily had great experiences with groupwork. The collaborative assignments during undergrad and my PG certificate as well as in my professional life were usually very much me and one or maybe two other group members doing a lot of the groundwork, with the rest occasionally coming in with a little bit of help. In the past, doing groupwork has very much felt like doing all the work with other people occasionally throwing a wrench into your plans.
2) I’m both ambitious and a perfectionist and my definition of when a thing is done often doesn’t align with other people’s ‘good enough is good enough’ approach. Which is fair and a valid way to go through life, but I don’t just want ‘okay’. I want to do work that I’m proud of, not just scrape by.
3) My brain doesn’t go from point A to point B, it goes through a spaghetti tangle of threads that seem incomprehensible to anyone but me until it winds up on the plate as a coherent dish. Collaborating with other people when I’ve not at least gotten to a full draft stage is usually confusing for everyone involved.
However, because learning is a thing we do here, the groupwork assignment for I.F. actually turned out to be a pleasant surprise. While yes, there was the obligatory group member who promised they’d do their section ‘by next time’ three times in a row and that felt painfully familiar, the other three of us managed to meet, engage, and work together really well. There’s this claim floating around that groupwork is supposed to create higher quality work than a single person could manage on their own, and while that’s always seemed far out of reach for me, it actually happened here. Collaborating, advocating for our own perspectives while still respecting others’, and building on each other’s ideas was more productive, more rewarding, and more enjoyable than the work would have been on my own.
This realisation won’t help me much in terms of my final project, but it did give me a little bit of a thrill. And it’ll be a good takeaway for life after graduation – if only to allow me to reminisce about the good old days whenever future group collaborations fall short of what I’ve now come to expect.
