my essay
April 19, 2004 @ 3:34 p.m.
So that essay that I've been working on feverishly, and having fun with?
Here it is:
Why I Write
In the beginning, I wanted to capture a single moment and make it poetry, appearing as prose. Rip out my heart, pour its juices fresh-squeezed onto the paper, discard the pulpy flesh.
This semester has been a giant purge of my creativity.
I am a firm believer in letting something sit, heavy, a metallic taste in the back of the throat, until it bursts from you. Until it cannot sit another minute, it must come out that moment onto whatever you can find to feverishly scrawl upon. This essay has sat all semester. I have watched two previous essays be vomited onto a computer screen and printed out for a grade.
They were sick sisters of this essay. They meant nothing. They had a disease; they were rushed.
Premature deliveries.
My professor asked me �So what?� about these essays. �So what?� and �Why should I read this?� and �Why should anyone care about this essay?� I did not have a good answer for him. There was a stumbling-through of thought and then somehow the nouns, prepositions, adjectives returned. But it was never good enough.
I know why those essays were abortions, why they couldn�t be brought to full term: they�re not mine. They don�t feel like mine. They don�t have my voice. The voice that those essays are written in is a voice I do not recognize. It is the voice of a stranger. And the stories that voice told aren�t the important ones. They aren�t ones that shaped me.
What shaped me was a blur of Black Velvet, the nostalgic whiskey that was never far from my father�s cup. His tears at being a failure, tears I started seeing at age seven. Memories, here and there, of sniffing Daddy�s plastic drinking cup to see if he had been drinking that night. Watching him become a parasite, feasting off pity and my mother�s paychecks.
Far too personal at the beginning of the semester, and far too personal now. Writing in my own voice brings back pain I thought I had flushed away long ago.
I doubt my ability to write, there is no question of that. I should not. I have been awarded in the past for my prose, first prizes for stories with clear protagonists and formulated dialogue. Granted, all that was ten years ago. Oh, how a decade makes you doubt.
And those pieces were fiction. This is the personal essay. This is about me. That thought scares me. Would I say too much? Would I not say enough? Would I have anything important to say?
There�s much for me to be scared of. My ideas come in spurts. A couplet or a sentence, when ideas manage to come at all. I am not a prolific writer. This means slow going. This means nurturing each idea when it manages to muck its way through. This means scribbling down thoughts in my own handwriting, to keep the process as comforting to the eye as possible.
This means nights awake, bent over printed-out copies of the piece, cursing the words that refuse to come poetically.
Writing is a struggle now. It used to come more easily. Now I am so used to having structure in my research papers, being forced into an introduction, body, conclusion, that it becomes a chore to find creativity in those rigid walls. Once e.e. cummings� bastard child, I am now the product of �higher learning.�
The process of writing exhausts me as nothing else does. It is the runner�s high, expressed in phrases. It is the precise fatigue of an eyestrain that comes from staring for hours at a single sentence. It is as painful as childbirth, long hours of great exertion before squeezing something from yourself that resembles you in certain degrees.
But always so exhausting.
And still I write. Still I battle with words, wrangling them into some semblance of order and of beauty. It is the war that every writer fights although it is fought for different reasons. Some write for the money, some for the fame, some, as Orwell says, for the sheer egoism of it.
My reason for writing? Empathy. I want to write so that it hurts you a little, a little like it has hurt me. Empathy has always been my goal. I�ve always wanted to craft words so carefully that you cannot help but feel what I feel. But empathy is a difficult craft to practice and to master without time and long nights awake.
So this semester is ending, but the battle with words to bring about empathy goes on. This essay is akin to clearing my throat, searching for a familiar voice. Perhaps finding that voice is what will make writing an easier journey. It is more likely that writing will never be easy, and I will simply grow fond of the process over time.
I know I have much more than a semester to find all of the big questions out.
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- - March 22, 2010
always the same - July 01, 2008
b-a-n-a-n-a-s! - December 25, 2006
elementary again - October 29, 2006
I don't like you, but I love you - October 03, 2006