On Writing Essays

I don’t exactly consider myself an essayist. A writer; yes. An author; certainly. My heart lies with fiction, as it always has. So the fact that I am now posting my very first entry on a blog meant for hosting my essays is somewhat surprising to me. I’ve had blogs before, of varying degrees of sombreness, but the amount of effort put into the entries there has been limited. I certainly didn’t pay too close attention to the structure and flow of most of them, which I feel are requirements for really having ‘worked’ on a piece of writing. I’ve always made more of an effort when writing fiction, but when a friend of mine started referring to certain longer text posts on tumblr as ‘essays’, it made me think. I’ve written plenty of essays in school, but I never really considered the possibility of writing them for myself. Would there be something for me to gain, personally? Perhaps other people would find them interesting to read, but I’m honestly not too concerned about that possibility. There are countless of essays out there on the internet, hiding mine away from the public would be no big loss. But perhaps writing – and posting – essays of my own could benefit me as a person.

I’m both new and experienced at writing essays. New in the sense that the very one you’re reading now is among the first to be posted publicly. Experienced because I’ve already written quite a few essays over the course of my education. Those essays haven’t been limited to just one genre, either; there have been analytical ones, personal ones, even a few political ones. I’ve gotten good grades for them, too. I have no intention of fooling myself, though. I know that the thirty-five essays (yes, I just went back and counted them. I just graduated and I’m not done celebrating) that I’ve written during my three years in secondary school mean squat in real life. They’re unlikely to be taken seriously by any reader except my teachers when they were grading them, and they’re probably not very indicative of me as a writer – or a person. They have been good practice, and I am without doubt a much better writer today than I was at the age of sixteen, in more ways than one. But by the end of the day, they have been written with a set of arbitrary goals in mind: A (typically unreasonably small) word count, requirements for theme or analysis that weren’t always particularly interesting, and, of course, the goal of getting a good grade. Was I ever given the choice between experimenting and playing it safe in my essays, I usually chose the latter. Either because I didn’t want to risk my 12, or because the subject wasn’t sufficiently interesting, or sometimes out of laziness – I had other homework to do, after all. It’s not that I never wrote anything interesting in school. I did get to write a twenty-page paper on the influence of Old Norse on Old English, which was what really piqued my interest in linguistics, the field of study I hope to pursue in the future. But my lack of experimentation in the writing I did for school can sometimes seem like bit of a waste. Looking at all thirty-five essays, plus the odd pieces of fiction I got to hand in, it’s a small percentage of them that I can look back on with any particular emotion.

Interestingly enough, the assignments I did in primary school might be a better candidate. They allowed for more experimenting, both because the grades didn’t have much of an influence on anything, and besides, you’d get full points just for being a decent speller. And experiment I did. I’ve been looking through my old writing the past few weeks; I always seem to do whenever the school year is about to end. Most of the texts I wrote back in primary school are … not good. That’s not exactly surprising considering I wrote them in my early teens, but once I get past the painfully purple prose and awkward punctuation and naïve attempts at words of wisdom, I see that they’re not that bad, either. I even feel that there’s a sort of intensity, a rapidness to them that my writing lacks today and I want to rediscover, maybe sans the extensive use of adjectives. And I definitely look back on these with fond eyes and a slight ache in my chest. I poured my heart and soul into these things. They were the heart and soul of an immature and somewhat pretentious child, and every other sentence I want to cringe, shake my head and go, “Oh, you were so wrong” (I’ll likely to the same in five years while reading what I’m writing now). But despite it all, I see myself growing and developing in those texts. I see myself exploring. I still grow and I still explore, but the fact that I was handing my writing over to an adult to read seems to have added some significance. Paradoxically, it even seems to have added a little courage; I might have been slightly more honest in my old essays than I would have been otherwise. My teacher was too prudent to comment in-depth on what I wrote, but I can’t help but wonder what she must have been thinking. In the eighth grade, I confessed my first love to her in a letter addressed to a classmate. A year later, I came out as I-don’t-really-know-what-but-definitely-not-straight in an essay involving smells, sounds, and the bodies of myself, a crush, and my parents floating among one another on a metaphysical plane in total darkness. Occasionally I’d throw all rules and restraints to the wind and burden my poor teacher with much more than what she was probably getting paid for, such as when I handed in a twenty-one-page novella when she had asked us to write “at least one and a half page”. Or, for our ninth-grade project, a total of 64 pages, forty of which were another novella taking place in an allegorical combination of Germany and the Soviet Union. “Next step is to learn how to limit yourself,” she told me repeatedly, but I never really followed up on that advice. I think I wanted to make the most of the time I had, on some level already having predicted the choice between good grades and experimentation I would have to make in secondary school.

Which brings me here. Secondary school is over (almost – I’m actually writing this while taking a break from studying for my exams). I won’t enrol in university for another year, and until then, I have total creative control over my own writing. The obvious question is what I want to do with it. That is what I hope this blog will help me find out. This first entry has been more of a stream-of-consciousness than a proper essay, I feel, which might not be the best way to start it all off. On the other hand, that fact might help emphasize the theme of experimentation that somehow snuck into this piece. As well as highlight how much I still have to learn. And I have to start somewhere.

So I’ll start here.