Writing, pt. 2

My professor told us that if we wrote down the one thing (or the three things) that we least wanted to write a personal essay about - not things that we thought weren't worth writing about, things that we weren't comfortable writing about - those topics would be the best essays we ever wrote - or the best essays we never wrote.

She said this shortly after assigning our first essay for the semester. I laughed to myself, thinking nope, not happening. The topic I've picked is presenting some organizational difficulties, but it's not too emotionally taxing (perhaps it should be? It's something about which I've given much thought but haven't written much. I can laugh about it now, and - somewhat important to me, yeh? - wouldn't mind the possibility of sharing it with the class).

So I didn't think too much about that. Well, actually, I did - I felt a bit guilty for passing up on the challenge - but I didn't feel guilty enough to write about things I really, really didn't want to write about.

I went to the library yesterday to get more pre-internship reading (YA books, yum). It was pouring outside - it rained all day; didn't let up until dinner - but for some reason that made the library trip better: it was my choice to walk through the rain to get books. Besides, books are totally worth a good soaking or two.

Anyway. Back to the point. At the library I thought I'd draft my essay. It was kind of rainy-day busy, but I found an empty table and sat down to write.

The draft's pretty bad. That's partly because, as I said earlier, it has organizational difficulties; it's partly because I didn't have the outline I'd written earlier; it's partly because it's just a draft. I wrote until I got stuck and then flipped to a new page.

When I try to write about difficult things - when I try to think about difficult things - I usually write or think in circles for a while before getting to my point. I think my problem has been that, in thinking about this particular topic, I usually go straight for the heart (aaaanndd... my blows rebound and I get punched in the gut. Or the face). This time I bypassed the armor and took a different tack, went for some somewhat less vital organs. To carry the metaphor a bit further, I still didn't reach the heart, but I think I did some significant damage.

I can't turn it in, of course. I might shred it. Or burn it. But - that I got somewhere - that I even tried - well, that's something, isn't it?