As you can tell, I didn’t manage to write one essay every single day. I’d like to claim I had less time than usual because of the holidays (isn’t that what adults always say?) but honestly, I had the time. So I wrote about one essay every other day.
What I Learned:
- The pre-thinking matters. Writing a good essay isn’t about the time when you sit down and say “I’m going to write an essay now!” It’s about all the time you’ve spent playing with the concepts in your head, reflecting, talking to others, and reforming your opinions. The first few essays came easily because I’d had them in the back of my head, knew the thesis, and just had to sit down and write it out. Some of them I’d been considering for years.
- Specific is better than general. When I ran out of essays I’d basically already written in my head, I had to spend more time thinking about the words to make my point. It got hardest when I got down to broad areas that I care about, like, “I want to write about gender.” I managed one essay on gender (made more specific through Jailbreak the Patriarchy), but i know I have far more thoughts on it. I just haven’t figured out how to take them down into distillable messages.
- Writing improves the quality of my thoughts. I like working with them and re-writing them to get to the right point. I could re-write any of the essays I’ve done so far and find out far more. It helps me think through the point, and figure out what I actually want to say.
- I like having an outlet to share my thoughts more broadly. I recently moved my domains away from GoDaddy to Bluehost, and decided to move my hosting there as well to make everything simple. In that process, I had a hard time getting my blog migrated (the XML file was too large to upload, splitting the file didn’t work, and I couldn’t just copy the directory because that didn’t generate the right databases). I was blog-less for about a week, and was surprised by how unsettled I felt. I had to ask myself “why?” because I’d gone months and months without writing in the blog before- why would a week be so bad? I’d already written a ton recently, it was Christmas, no one would miss it, etc. I never came to a strong conclusion on this- just that I felt uncomfortable not having a way to share my thoughts with the world.
- I also like having the essays to share with people I might not talk to – I was happy that my essay about the Awesome Foundation was read by other trustees, and that my one on 2+2 was read by people in the 2+2 (and hopefully some people considering it!) It’s much easier to send someone an essay than it is to request hours of their time.
- Practice helps! I feel like having spent a month trying to come up with good essays, I think about essays a lot more. I expect to be writing down my thoughts, and I try to be more tangible about my thoughts. I think I’ll be more likely to continue writing essays now that I have a good foundation. Writing has been part of my morning routine, and what I use my morning papers* for.
I really enjoyed doing this project. I’m not sure what my next writing-step will be. I’ll still be working on distilling the 50,000 words that I wrote in November. I’ll also probably keep writing essays when I have insight to share. I’ve been considering writing more letters to friends. I’ll happily take suggestions for writing projects that I can tackle next!
*Morning papers are a technique commonly used by writers to get their thoughts out. It’s usually 3 handwritten pages (or about 750words, which is the tool I use to do it).