Talking to Brett
Feb 10, 2004 Writing
A good essay is like a well decorated room. Each carefully selected piece complements the other pieces but the room itself is totally contained within it’s four walls. When I read a tightly written essay, I feel as if I’ve stepped into the author’s room and am visiting their frame of mine. A poorly written essay just seems messy and self-indulgent and without a central theme to tie it all together.
I am often guilty of a common essay crime: merely showing a fragment of an idea or a snapshot of a memory and not moving it forward to illuminate an idea. This is a cardinal sin of short story writing, too: omitting the plot. The reader should be somehow moved along an emotional or intellectual journey.
I once wrote an essay about new motherhood and hanging diapers out on the line. I sent it to an editor and received a much nicer rejection than I deserved, “This is a pleasant piece but nothing really happens.” What I thought I was doing was explaining how I — a former go-get-’em, busy, frantic personality — had become someone slower, more thoughtful, more content. But instead I just gave a snapshot: Here I am hanging diapers on a line with a baby at my feet. It was a nice picture but it wasn’t a good essay.
My challenge in the book is that each chapter will be more than a personal, creative essay. I want to place things within a context that is outside of me and so I’m going to have to quote people and mention books or articles and it’s much more hard core than most of what I’ve done in the past. It’s more like what I did in college, I guess.
I told Brett that one thing that scares me about this is that books like these are invitations to argue. I want my book to be thought-provoking and provoking thought also necessarily means provoking disagreement. It’s frightening to know that this is a consequence of writing such a book. If it’s read (and I hope it’s read), then people are going to want to poke holes in it and find all the little flaws and incidents of intellectual laziness and use these to discredit what I say. Even people who agree with it and like it will be looking at it critically because that’s how you’re supposed to look at these books. You’re supposed to say, “Well, that’s true but then what about when you look at it in this way.”
Daunting, eh? That’s why I’m putting my head down and just trying to write. Right now I’m focusing on getting my very most basic ideas down. B. (my IRL writer friend) has told me to focus on the chapter, which I originally thought was the whole book, and that will help me see if I can/want to write the whole thing.
Interestingly, the part I thought was the book she thinks is a chapter and the part that I thought might be a chapter she thinks is the book. She took the bigger idea and recommended that I focus it and then took the smaller idea for the whole book. To carry my original metaphor further, she basically helped me see that the smaller idea is a house that contains many rooms. What I thought was a bigger idea, is a room with lots of stuff in it. Now it seems obvious to me that it should be organized in this way but I was personally focused on one small bit and missed the rest of the mosaic. She’s been reading my blog since it was on my .kjsl site and she said that she could see the theme in it even when I couldn’t.
Isn’t life interesting?
February 10th, 2004 at 5:18 pm
Adrienne Rich said:
“Everything you write
will be used against you,
or against someone you love.
These are the terms.
Take them or leave them.”
I take an odd comfort in that.