Examinations And Expression

Have you ever walked out of an exam that had been hanging over you for weeks, after finishing early and feeling like it went pretty well, causing you to be filled with the most intense certainty that you must have forgotten something, or been in the wrong exam or actually fallen asleep at the desk and dreamt the success?

That was the sensation i had at around 11 o'clock this morning as i left the Political Theory exam that has been terrifying me for the past week. It seemed anti-climactic, like the part of a movie where the good guys think they've won against the big bad, but the wise old one knows it was far too easy and there's a bigger bad around the corner. It was nowhere near horrific to justify the amount of fear and tension it had caused and that makes me suspicious.

Until i actually get the results back i guess i'll just have to put up with this sensation that it was all a trick and i'm going to find out i somehow did it all wrong any minute now.

With that out of the way and my next exam, on American politics, not until the 25th of May i think i'm going to have a couple of relatively relaxed days before launching into revision for that, though compared to today's exam i'm practically coasting on a wave of confidence.

I'll probably watch a couple of films and read a bit of a book that has absolutely nothing to do with political theory. I'd like to do a bit of writing but the inconvenience of having an utter lack of ideas is getting in the way of that. During the last year of 6th form and the first of University writing creatively was an outlet for me, a way to work out some of the stress and worries i had; it was a good form of escapism for me but recently i've not managed to write anything i actually like.

It's frustrating because i would love to find that spark again, the kind of spark that saw me write an 80,000 word story in around 8 months. Rereading that story now i'm very aware of it's limitations and the fact that it's not all that great, but while i was writing it i was genuinely happy because i was caught up in imagining this world and playing with the best ways to put it on paper. It was the creative experience as much as the actual output that i enjoyed and it's that same experience that i want to rediscover.

I've been looking over a few of the half finished or barely started story ideas that litter the documents folder on my computer but sadly looking over them i can see why i abandoned most of them. There's only one which is nearly finished and i'm just missing a chapter to precede the final two that are already written, to make the pay off feel justified and natural rather than forced. All the rest just seem cheesy, lacking the quality of character or concept that justified the cheesiness and allowed me to keep going with the few stories i have actually finished.

I'm going to spend the evening watching the second Championship semi-final (i'll write about the Forest one once i've had a bit of time to recover from the disappointment) and brainstorming ideas for a new story/the missing chapter of the short story that is nearly finished.

For now i'll leave you with a song off Frank Turner's new album 'England Keep My Bones', released at the start of June.