Interview with James Crook

James is studying English with a focus on Modernism and how it combines with religion, which has been largely influenced by his Christian-turned-agnostic upbringing. As well as spending most of his time in the library he enjoys playing darts with his mates and training Brazilian jiu-jitsu with Royal Holloway’s MMA society.

James’s top tips:

• Take the time to plan essays out and surround yourself with people who sit down and get things done.

• Choose quotes for a reason and use them to support your point.

• Do your reading in advance.

• Look after yourself and do what you enjoy to relax!

MIEKE:  Today I'm joined by James. Can you start by telling me what you study and what module this piece was for?

JAMES:  I study English and it was for the Modernist Literature module which is run by Finn Fordham.

MIEKE:  Thank you. What's your piece of writing about and what interested you in the topic?

JAMES:  The essay itself is titled ‘how far should we take revelations of truth in modernist fiction at face value?’ I chose D.H. Lawrence’s The Thimble and Samuel Beckett’s Dante and the Lobster.  I was drawn to it because it grapples with the relationship between religion, the everyday living and forgiveness. D.H. Lawrence's text meditates on selflessness and representation of wider society through the individual. I've got a Christian family who's got backgrounds in psychology and sociology, so these texts help me bring all my interests together.

MIEKE:  Can you explain the question and how you went about breaking it down and coming up with an argument? English questions can be quite complex, so could you just tell me a bit more about how you went about breaking that down so you could answer it?

JAMES:  I took the question and the idea of taking revelations of truth and modernist fiction at face value – I interpreted it as: how much is the author lying to you? How much Is the author giving you something and encouraging you to take it at face value when you should actually be looking at it more?   So, it was a lot of reading the text and trying to understand whether they're being fully truthful and looking for evidence that they're not.

MIEKE:  How did you approach planning, researching, and drafting this piece?

JAMES:  Reading and rereading the texts over and over was helpful.  It's a lot more difficult to do that with novels, but because these are short stories it was easier for me to just sit down and just read it over and over and over again. Each time I did I found new information I could work with, just to add to my understanding of the text.  In terms of researching: Google Scholar and JSTOR were unbelievably helpful, they're really good.  A lot of my writing was on Christianity, so I did a lot of reading the Bible before I started writing, which is also quite helpful, and then Oxford English Dictionary was brilliant. Drafting, I found that I shouldn't be afraid to edit as I go. I think that once you sort of finish two and half thousand-word essay and then try and go back and edit it - you've almost convinced yourself of your own argument, even though it might not be true. And then you've also just got a massive wall of text to try and sift through and look for grammatical notes. So, writing one paragraph, editing the paragraph, writing another paragraph, editing that one, and then just doing it bigger at the end is helpful for me.

MIEKE:  Were there any particular books or articles that you found useful when writing this piece?

JAMES:  For this essay, again, the Bible was very useful, especially the passages concerning Cane and Abel, the story of Jonah, and Pontius Pilate when he sentences Jesus to death. I think the Bible is sort of amazing. It doesn't matter whether you believe it or not. I personally don't. But the stories in the Bible, are sick to read.  Jean-Michel Rebatè’s essay, ‘Love and Lobsters, Beckett's Meta-Ethics’   His language makes nice links between the Christian religion and Beckett's text.  And then Leo Gurko’s essay, which is titled ‘D.H. Lawrence's Greatest Collection of Short Stories - What Holds It All Together’ gave amazing context and background to D.H. Lawrence and the actual text that I was researching.

MIEKE:  What challenges did you face while writing this essay, and how did you overcome them?

JAMES:   I would be lying if I said I didn't prefer Beckett's text over Lawrence's.  I absolutely loved Samuel Beckett and I’m doing my dissertation on him and James Joyce.   With this essay I also had to include D.H. Lawrence and I struggled to keep the word count even, but I convinced myself that I like D.H. Lawrence so I could keep it more regular.   Also just sitting down to plan it and write it all. I've got a lot of nervous energy, I hate sitting still, so actually having to sit down and just work on it was quite difficult, but surrounding yourself with people that want to sit down and study definitely helped me when I was writing this.

MIEKE:  What have you gained from writing the essay? Do you feel it benefited you in any way?

JAMES:  It's made me a little bit more confident in terms of my abilities to write an essay. I'd written about religion before in my first year, but never this in depth or with this much detail, so it was nice to be able to take a childhood of going to church and put it into a piece of writing.  Also, I've realised that I work best when I'm writing about one text at a time. I don't work well when I'm trying to integrate two texts into an essay and they're interlinking. I prefer writing about one thing and then another.

MIEKE:  Can I ask, how do you go about integrating quotes into your essays in a way that will help strengthen your point as opposed to just being there.   It's difficult to pick the right quotations, I just wanted to know if you could give our listeners any pointers about that, because yours were nicely embedded.

JAMES:  Don't just put a quote in there for no reason, make your point and then use the quote to back it up and then explain why that quote backs your point up.   You have to make things so obvious. And don't put it in there for no reason, have a reason that you're putting the quote in and integrate it into your sentence. It sounds a lot easier said than done because it is. It's quite difficult to put quotes in.

MIEKE:  Looking back at your second year, what would your advice be for students in the English department? Do you have any tips for them?

JAMES:  The reading will get more intense. Do your reading in advance. Reading lists in the English department are ridiculously long. There's no way you're going to get it all done, so just pick out a few texts that you're really looking forward to, read those, and then do the rest as you go. Communicate with your lecturers and make use of their office hours.   They're there to help you do well at the end of the day. And I know it’s annoying, you think you're done with the day and then you have to go to a meeting, but it is worth it. And then this is a stereotypical one but take care of yourself.  You underestimate how intense a course like English is. Just go to the pub. Just be with your friends, you're not going to fail your degree from taking a couple of days out and there's no point burning yourself out for three years. So just find what makes you relax and just spend time with your friends.

MIEKE:  Perfect. Thank you for joining me, James.   It's been interesting discussing your essay on Modernism.

JAMES:  Thank you.