the thing about essays that really frustrated me when i was in k-12 was that they were boring, hard, and no matter what i did there was always some feedback about how my ideas "weren't quite there" or were underdeveloped or how some of them were off-topic to the main point of the essay, etc. etc. etc. – when i got older i realized that the point of essay-writing is that it assesses critical thinking, something i was actively developing at the age i was being assigned those essays, which can't be taught directly and instead needs to be fostered; then, that critical thinking needed to be applied in a very specific way to a kind of writing that was really (maybe overly) structured, and that i was being assessed on both the ideas being presented and the writing communicating those ideas. the way i got over this (definitely over years and years, not all at once) was realizing that the point of an essay (and the kind of unspoken process of thinking critically) was:
1. deciding / finding what i actually think – usually starting with a question about the subject, and then trying to answer it myself (which meant picking a sufficiently interesting question)
2. proving / demonstrating what i actually think – this is the breaking down; what can i extract from a source that agrees or disagrees with my thoughts, what are some secondary sources that can further elaborate on or contextualize my thoughts, and laying all those pieces out
3. putting those pieces in order on the page so that the person reading them can follow the train of thought and (hopefully) arrive at the same conclusion – this is the putting back together
it can feel like other folks know what they're going for but really it's either knowing the audience (i.e. [teacher / reader] is probably looking for this kind of question or this kind of answer) and then applying that process, or they're just really in touch with their creative and critical faculties such that they can identify an interesting question and a thoughtful answer
that stuff comes with time (or at least it did for me) because critical thinking is an innate human quality; everyone has at one point or another asked a non-empirical question and arrived at their own conclusion to that question, but learning how to structure that thinking and write well enough to effectively express that perspective for a teacher, academic journal, etc. is something that requires you to practice at it and experience more life and have more thoughts that can feed into that process. and the fostering piece is so important because i feel like that requires extra care and investment on the part of the person educating you who at best is wildly under-resourced to do so and at worst has decided that's just not a part of their job description and therefore something they won't touch with a ten-foot pole
all this to say i do relate, i think that doesn't feel like it's the case for me anymore necessarily and i'm sure at some point it won't for you – and even if essays never end up being your bag, there are so many other forms and mediums to communicate complex ideas that can often be much more resonant and beautiful for people, essays are not the end-all-be-all way to communicate big thoughts
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chances are, from my experience at least, if you wrote an essay on the same topic as everyone else, it’d largely be about the same things/arguments as other students just with your personal spin on it, which is great, but not always exciting. The fact that your brain went in a completely different direction is admirable in its own right. Anyone who thinks differently by nature is 10X more intriguing, intelligent, and valuable in my eyes. I’d prefer to read the one essay that wasn’t following the guidelines because at least it’s something new!
One way I really relate to this as well: back in high school I had a great art teacher who assigned us with an abstract painting assignment once . Yet, somehow, I managed to create the most realistic painting with figures and clear depictions of people and objects while everyone else’s works looked like Kandinsky was amongst us… I had no intention of doing that but I did, and she couldn’t believe it. She even kept that artwork for future classes to show students what NOT to do for that assignment as well as others because it wasnt the only time I unintentionally strayed away from the project plan . with that said however, I was one of her favorite students for that very reason, because I cared about the work, but wasnt worried about breaking the rules and letting my heart and inclinations guide me towards what I felt I needed to do or was interested in making. And I found at that time, that people will always respect that, so maybe you’re onto something here 🤞🏿
Nov 21, 2024
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at least for me, writer's block occurs when i feel like i've exhausted thoughts, ideas, motifs, etc. that used to fuel creative output previously – but changing your perspective (either by changing your influences, or your environment, etc.) will put more gas in your tank to write new, exciting things, and to experiment with how you write about those things
in the artist's way, julia cameron mentions how a core tenant of the program is "artist dates" where you go out on a solo excursion to give yourself more creative "input" like novel life experiences, new perspectives on familiar experiences, etc. that can then funnel into creative output
i think a similar effort is just reading more; for example, i like sci-fi as a consumer, but when i was reading parable of the sower by octavia butler for a book club, i was so inspired by it that previous projects in that genre i had parked because they felt uninspired became exciting to work on again. new sci-fi projects came to me and gave me some runway to outline / draft them. same for fantasy, non-fiction, etc
the more you're inspired (either by your experiences or your influences) the easier it will be to write more, because exploration will often take less effort than refinement. both are essential parts of the process, but if you're exclusively refining based on a body of work limited in scope, it's going to take more time / be more agonizing / feel less worth it; if you can expand that scope, there'll always be something to say on the page
Feb 10, 2025
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Once you get over that one-inch barrier between fiction and non-fiction, your world will broaden drastically. And you'll see rhat those thoughts and feelings you've privately worried are too wierd and unrelatable to tell anyone, well . . . Plenty others have felt it all before.
I also recommend bastardizing cogent thoughts from incredible people.
3d ago
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024