Essay Exercise: sailing on the craft of words

Take a tour of books and articles and blogs that promote themselves as guides for writing. Be prepared for an endless summer. The experts and pundits (or those who profess themselves to fit this job description) grow exponentially by the day. The glut of words about words would take several lifetimes to wade through. The flood of words, on any topic, requires FEMA sized resources. In the coming weeks and months, I will post signposts for those looking to find whist I believe to be the best sites, writers, and books on the art and craft of writing. Some of them shine from afar—La Tour Eiffels of sounds and syllables. Others require, if not footnotes, then at least some creative translation and interpretation of contexts. Some of the words about writing are themselves works of art and thus embody both a form and a content worth slow reading.

Today, however, I propose to show and tell something about writing by an exercise in speed. What follows is a response to a discussion about writing by a group of admission experts on the website LinkedIn. The contributors disagree about the state of writing in the world today. Some say it has fallen so far into the sins of slothful cliché and pride-driven self-promotion that there is no saving it. Others say the saviors of students are there if they are willing to follow a certain path and pay a certain price.

The exercise I designed was to give myself 10 minutes to respond. Writing under deadlines induces stress, but sometimes it forces us out of our usual approach. First drafts sometimes work well when composed as a blur of quick keystrokes. Why? Even the intimidation demon needs sleep:  bursting through the doors of self-consciousness can, with luck and practice, bypass the by-product of methodical reasoning--self-censoring. The imagination gets some unsupervised play out in the open air and light of language. But as with any writing strategy, this one might work for some; for others, a slow warm up before the trip through the rapids might work better. If there is one thing about writing I can assert without qualification: it comes in more colors and voices and textures than any single guidebook can ever claim to teach. 

  

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Writing sings sinks stinks or soars roars and wounds or applies smoothly manufactured and Lotus eating balm. Words do and don’t. They’re just tools. Some use them well to fix things in business and words of three syllables slow the pit stop of an email or memo. They teach this simplified approach in some of the top business schools in the world. And yet the world is filled with Flaubertian craftsmen too in ways never seen before in history. The billions of people out there make sure the bell curve has plenty of poets of prose and plenty of dead or seriously wounded sentences too.

The paragraph above owes many of its rhythms to William Gass. Most have never read him. He’s the writer’s writer’s writer cliché that gets inked onto too many today. But for some the words are opaque and baroque at once.  Both/and again and again.

Switch discourse: 42% of grades earned in college=A. Most doing the teaching of writing and reading are adjunct or graduate students who are exploited and have little time to engage in page long critiques. Adam Smith’s ghosted invisible hand now commands skills thought to be lost or no longer taught or both.

But moving words written well are living inside us. This is old news. Socrates demonstrates, in his dialogue Meno, how even a slave with no education has the structure of mind to solve problems in geometry.

We are wired for stories and words:  read Homer, Chomsky, and Pinker. But which words in what order? To learn to be a poet or a Huffington hack or a blogger or anything requires practice. Practice can be dancing deftly among clichés, as that is how to blink through things quickly. It’s useful. Slow reading and writing cost time, the thing that gets shorter each year. $300,000,000 to lay new cable for fiber optic to make sure trades between New York and London speed up by .0049 seconds.  (Harper’s Index.) Time is thought as much as money and the ‘future trenders’ ask us to sound bite issues into all or nothings or over the top claims. Who has time to read books, or long articles, or participate in the give and take of reasoned exchange?

Out of my 10-minute investment, I think, today anyway, there are some seeds of thought and some sentences that could form the core of a good essay. Each paragraph could be turned into an essay. The associative logic meanders. Montaigne, the person who coined the term essay, and who wrote some of the best essays ever, says essays should digress. Others after him disagree, but the words in this writing exercise are concrete enough, in a few places, to fulfill the cliché ‘seeds of thought’. Or maybe not. These words are fresh and have just been set into the earth. Our interpretive ability to respond to written words, even our own, often takes a while to mature. When I return to the ones above I may find them fruit-filled or may find bare branches that need to be chopped. For some, an empty screen or page signifies the openness of all possibility. But, for me-- the white Nothingness of the screen scares me every time I see it. Better to jump in than a long slow approach? Maybe a few 10 minutes essays on topics you care about will let you know if this might be something you like. More importantly, this exercise might prepare you to compete well in the high stakes competitions of college and admission essays.