COFFEE & BISCUITS

I find my experience in choosing paper topics in my English classes a suitable analogy to writing research papers. According to all my English teachers — the more specific the topic, the better.

A good paper (English) is able to analyze all aspect of the character and has a central thesis — the English teacher emphasizes.

Over the years, I have found a fail-safe plan — just find a minor character of the novel and dissect it. A minor character allows me to have more scope to interpret it because it is not already well developed by the author. Thus, I can hijack the character, and no one can say I am wrong. Furthermore, since the character didn’t get as much attention as the main character, when I bring her out into the spotlight, I, as the author, am deemed to get some attention.

For example, in writing a paper about Lolita, I picked the character Charlotte Haze, and wrote a 6 pages paper about her, and of course obtained excellent marks.

After watching Dark Knight, I eschewed the dark themes about hope which prevails across the 3 hour film and picked on the minutest point about the film’s discrimination against China.

But this fail-safe plan does not get other people to remember your work, for ultimately they just don’t care or get passionate about them.

So, now it’s time to, perhaps, stop this fail-safe plan, and be brave. And plunge into the messy world the major characters — or topics, in the case of research.