I've started writing a biography.
Maybe it's too early to say that. I'm still gathering my sources, secondary and primary, and still taking notes. So many notes. I downloaded over a dozen academic articles, I have five books, I plan to get more books from the library this afternoon. The desire to do this slowly swelled within the recesses of my psyche ever since I finished the 25 page research paper. I had a lot of fun writing it. It never got boring, it never felt daunting. I worked on it for hours every day, reading books, reading articles, taking notes, doing original research. I came to realize over the past weeks -- I really miss it. It's over and through, the class is over and through, I probably will not have to write another paper for the remainder of my duration at this university. But I miss it. I came to the conclusion a couple of weeks ago -- I could write a biography. It's really quite exciting and I anticipate it to be really fun.
Initially, my subject was Sergei Rachmaninoff, the Russian composer and conductor, but I observed that five biographies of him already exist. I did not accept defeat; I decided I would do Vladimir Harowitz. He was an excellent pianist, and my interest in him is emergent of the fact that he was good friends with Rachmaninoff, and would regularly perform his music. Rachmaninoff said that Harowitz played them the way he could only dream of playing. So I look to see if biographies already exist. They do -- in fact, there are four that I could find. Defeated, I decided to find a more obscure man to write on, someone who has no more than one biography already written. And then it dawned on me, descended upon me like rapture. Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix!
The last and greatest king of the Gauls. There is no biography written of him in the English language -- there are several in French, but none in English. It's a niche desparately aching to be filled. The only issue is that we have no idea what his childhood was like; we don't know if he was educated, who his friends were, what his relationships were like. It would be a biography of speculation. This speculation, though, can be educated speculation -- we know a lot about ancient Celtic culture, about what life was like for the Gallic people. We know Vercingetorix was charismatic; he united all the tribal leaders of Gaul into a singular entity, despite their differences, to fight for freedom against Caesar. His father was killed by these tribal leaders for attempting to become king, but Vercingetorix managed to pull it off. Additionally, we know from Caesar that his army was well-organized, and that he used a "scorched earth" policy -- he burned everything, all the fields, all the supplies, so that Caesar's legion would starve.
He was born decades before Christ, in a culture foreign to us today. But, to this day, he is considered a national hero to the French; numerous Frenchmen have written about him; statues of him exist, depicting him as a freedom fighter, a man of courage and nobility. I intend to explore this in the biography as well. I wrote up an outline, of all the topics I want to cover and the order I want to cover them in. I plan to flesh out this outline as the research makes my task more intelligible and tangible, and less ephemeral and vague.
Ugh. It's all I can think about. It's the only thing I want to do. I expect it to be quite the task, but I'm not rushing myself. Rushing myself, self-imposed deadlines, a target daily wordcount, I have observed that these things are the cause of burnout, at least for me. I am choosing to work at my own pace; instead of target wordcount, I might try target time spent writing. Maybe two pomodoros a day, or something along those lines. It's a tangible goal, but there's less pressure, less ego, less stress if I were to "fall behind".