The way essays are assigned and handled in middle school and high school English classes is just atrocious. Take my word for it; I've absolutely gotten my fair share of those incredibly dislikeable, poorly constructed, uninspiring prompts from past English teachers. I'm no stranger to busywork. Frankly, writing essays before college is honestly just kind of miserable. Back when I was in high school, the way I saw it, I didn't think that my opinions mattered to any of my teachers. Essays were nothing more than ways for them to measure my abilities so they could judge me. Nothing was redeeming or appealing about it because of how impersonal and artificial it always felt.
As I've grown, both as a student by profession and as a writer by vocation, it's gotten progressively easier for me to find the necessary motivation to just completely dominate even the most boring of essays. Back in high school, I was told on many occasions that "the hardest part of college is going to be the essays." Yeah. That’s completely, entirely false. First of all, the real hardest part of college is maintaining a healthy diet. Second of all, college essays, in their rightfully daunting and hysterically complex nature, should rightfully be some of the most enjoyable projects any college student will undertake.
In college, especially at a college with small classes, all of the impersonal, artificial meaninglessness of writing essays in high school just slips away. A college education is supposed to tie together a person’s academic career, professional endeavors, and vocational obligations. As time goes by, you start to realize that the academic work that you do is no longer just for a grade or for the purpose of judgment by an authority. You realize that your work is made to be relevant to your life. You start to write less because somebody else tells you to, and more for the sake of exploration and enrichment. The more essays I write for my classes, the more I'm able to embrace the idea that any essay - no matter how boring its subject or inspiration might be - is always mine to seize entirely; it is all mine to shape, bend, and manipulate into whatever I want, and the purpose of the essay is entirely up to me.
Here's a hot take: essays are the most social form of writing. The best way for a writer to have a meaningful exchange about any given subject or idea is to write an essay about it. There is no better way to tell anyone, or any group of people, how passionate you are about something than writing an essay. Not even the most informal, abstract poetry could ever hope to surpass an essay as the best medium for emotional language.
In case you couldn't already tell, essays are my preferred medium of writing. I struggle with the narrative aspect of fiction writing, and I feel pretty despondent towards my ability to write purely expository nonfiction (my emotions and opinions always find some way to leak into my writing). The essay writing process is very much an external affair. A writer's sense of empathy and their ability to connect with the world around them are much more useful in writing essays than they are writing fiction. (I'd actually argue that the key to writing good fiction is to be able to become appropriately detached from one's surrounding environment.)
I’d consider myself a “creative extrovert.” Similarly to how a social extrovert is energized by social interaction, I find inspiration, motivation, and the necessary energy to write and create by looking towards the people and the world around me. Of course, it’s also totally valid to be a “creative introvert”: someone who finds inspiration, motivation, and creative energy in exploring their own thoughts, ideas, emotions, and dreams.
Rather than writing privately for myself and my own fulfillment, I get fulfillment from sharing my thoughts, feelings, and ideas with other people. The most valuable kind of exchanges which I think I’m able to have with other people are those in which I'm able to freely tell them what kind of things matter to me just as much as they're able to freely tell me what kind of things matter to them. That's what I feel like essays are meant to be; they are the perfect medium for these kinds of unhindered, free, open, meaningful exchanges, which can be made to be about anything and everything.
The essays you write should liberate you, inspire you, challenge you, frustrate you, and change you, and there's really nothing you can do to stop that.
Song suggestion: Father John Misty - I'm Writing A Novel
