BLARGH

I'm trying to figure out what to do for the writing sample required for grad school applications. They want a 10-20 page "major paper" from an undergrad German Studies course. I ... don't have any. We wrote short papers that were in response to a series of questions/prompts. I have a 5-pager I wrote while I was in Marburg (about Schnitzler's Reigen). I can't find the 3-pager I wrote on Marx & Hegel in Ideas & Power (I found all the other papers, but not that one :P Does anybody have a functional 3.5" floppy drive? Maybe it's miraculously on one of the dozen diskettes I have.)

What I should do is just email the directors of graduate studies and ask which is better, to submit multiple shorter papers (which don't have secondary sources or research, either, because we didn't have access to German journal in college) or to write a new one.

What I've been doing is checking out books from the library and downloading all the articles that sound interesting.

I thought maybe I could do a translation paper, so I translated a piece and then found this and gave up on life. Like, LITERALLY minutes after finishing the translation, I went to that site to look up this article for ideas on things to include in a translation paper, and OH LOOK at what's on the front page. GAH.

It's a good story, though, and you should go read it.

So maybe I'll pick something else. There's one that looks like a fun challenge because of all the plays on words and cultural references, and another longer piece that I liked (which would make it easier to hit 10 pages ngl).

I don't know. *flails*

And a writing question for you

I'm plotting a superhero spy novel. Should I use villain-perspective scenes or not? Would it add to or decrease the suspense?

There's one thing that I think would heighten the suspense for the reader, because it shows they're barking up the wrong tree and also [spoiler], but villain-perspective scenes can mess things up if done badly.

Your thoughts?