Essay on Essaying

Writing is often listed as the pursuit of truth by those people who like to deal a hefty trade in truth. They are, however, probably wrong. Truth is an un-malleable substance at it core, a substance that must exist in only a very few forms for it to work whatsoever. Writing shares none of these characteristics. Writing is an art; it requires knowledge about the steps and styles, the forms and choices, in essence, the craft. Writing is a craft, a craft that has a number of highly precise tools and a fine assortment of hammers at its disposal. Learning to write well requires years of practice and a practical dedication to doing things the way they should be done over the way you want to do them.

Writing is rarely about what you say; it is all in the delivery.


Day 1
Opening the Book

When I first entered the Non-Fiction class at Southern Utah University I was coming back from one of those breaks where everything that I did amounted to the sum total of nothing. The most stirring accomplishment of my Christmas break was playing Legend of the Five Rings for 33 consecutive hours. Excitement. Entering the classroom I was staggered by the group of souls within. Nearly thirty students were occupying a room apparently built for ten. I clutched my closed-session add slip in a white-knuckled hand. I glared about the room, looking for holes in the people. Some of them, I hoped, would not be here by the next class. I took a seat upon a table and waited for the opening spiel. The class instructor Melissa Frateriggo is a younger woman with an ethnicity that is hard to place. She had brown hair that hung just below her jaw line and wide set features that left a smoothness to her face. She carried herself well but wasn’t precisely outgoing in any particular sense.

She explained the rules and regulations of the class including the attendance policy, which was understandably strict considering that most of the class was dedicated to discussion of outside and inside works. I felt like her eyes were boring a hole in my chest when she announced the “no late work clause.” I have always attempted to be a good student in life, and until the past three years I have been. Perhaps the shift had something to do with my getting tossed out of a university abroad and forced to seek shelter within a less than prestigious institution of higher learning. Or maybe it was because I had shifted something in my own personal paradigm. Regardless of the reason, I was committed to working whenever it felt like the thing to do and flinging far fetched excuses the remainder of the time.

Of course I had a sort of thing for her too. Most of the students did. Maybe it was because she was new and young. Maybe it was because she was pleasant and witty. Maybe it was because she was a writer, and I’m always a sucker for an artist.

Class ended, I skulked out, intent to make my decision to join the class on a later date. Melissa figured that I should probably seek another class herself, as she sent me an e-mail the following day explaining that it would probably benefit me to have a class that required less attendance and perfunctory dedication to the subject matter. I balked at the e-mail and decided to prove her wrong about me, that I really was a dedicated individual locked in the midst of a hellish life that I had not chosen for myself but was forced to deal with anyway.

That or maybe that thing I had for her was larger than academically acceptable.


Day 10
Emotion

Exercise # 3 was due. I had put together a piece based upon a five-year weekly recurring nightmare. I was trying to show something of what created the entity that I inhabit to the other students. The purpose of the assignment was to show emotion in writing. The most important emotion out there, to me, is fear. Love has problems in being an emotion that controls you, hate is too linear to be useful, desire is a strong emotion, but is ultimately an emotion born of something else. Fear is where I stake my claim for the first impetus for human activity. Other members of the group read their pieces; I cannot remember the names of the students, regrettably. One person wrote a rather silly piece about their truncated Mormon relationship with a guy. In case you have never lived in Utah, I’ll explain. The typical relationship in Utah features a couple that meets somewhere in the first three years of college, decide that now is the time to get married, and regardless of how much either person means to the other they are engaged in three weeks and married in six months. They make terrible writers as their life experience is so convoluted towards one set of events, which I refer to as “the pattern”, that you cannot read more than one of them without starting to repeat yourself in a sort of organic two-step.

Keith Ben Stein was the next to read. Keith is a great guy, full of wit and a strange self effacing quality that tends to buoy the people around him by putting himself down. I often feel uncomfortable talking to him about anything more than a surface matter because I don’t want him to tell me how great I am. In fact I might appreciate a large number of people telling me something about how great I am not. Then again, maybe I’m just saying that.

I read my piece and watched the faces of my audience. A look formed in their eyes that I have seen before. A sense that whatever world it is that I have come from is not on their list of vacation spots, and sometimes, they are sorry they even flipped through the brochure.


Day 13
Essay #1

At the time I had been struggling to write a single coherent paragraph for five days. I don’t get writers block, I disassociate. I lose it. One half of me disagrees with the other half of me and I spend hours to weeks spinning in a circle waiting for an outside influence to shove me one way or another. Writing on deadline, my passion, my dream, becomes a dark torment, a nightmare constructed of too much stress about a test, a sick pleasure like cutting up your mothers couch just so that you will get in trouble. I told Melissa that I had nearly finished the assignment and would get it to her by 5:00 in the evening. I sat down at 4:30 and cobbled together three journal articles into an essay. The essay had no point save a brutal reflection of me talking to me about me, but I figured I had to get something in, and knowing the human algorithm it would probably be heralded as a gripping and fine piece.

There are days when the lying becomes to big for you and you feel that you must tell the truth to one single person, the whole truth, as you see it, whether they understand or not. I got my piece in at 5:00 as promised and returned to home. It was a Monday, and if I am not mistaken I played Devil May Cry for the PS2 until 1:00 in the morning. I did not feel good, but I pressed on.

Somewhere in my not too distant future, or my recent past, the keys to success were waiting for me to do something with the mess that I see as my life.


Day 15
Unnatural Defense

They were talking about my piece. The thing that I had cobbled together. The thing that reflected opinions I had two entire years ago. Opinions that I had given only a cursory glance to in the ten minutes it took for me to slap it together. I sat back with a little grin on my face. Inside I was laughing; outside I could barely contain myself. They took the whole piece seriously. They thought that what I had written was interesting, and deep, and useful. I knew that it was nothing. It was me ranting to me. It wasn’t valuable it was stupid. It was something that I should never have done. I should have taken a zero rather than subject my fellow students, and writers, to this false art. This horrible project that amounted to nothing more than a guy taking crap and displaying it in a way that people who where too in touch with the art world and nowhere near reality could proclaim its brilliance. Proclaim because it was placed in front of them and they didn’t understand it but thought that since it was there they needed to.

I felt cheap. I felt used, even though I was using. Then I started to feel something else entirely. They liked what I had written. They liked this incredibly personal item; this record of my thoughts in the grips of a depression that spanned four months. Four months that found me joining the Air Force briefly, being tossed out for mental instability. Four months, one of which was spent with Wendy. Whom I had loved. Who I still love, who I was not joking too when I proposed to her; even if she thinks so. They were seeing something in my words. Something that I had placed there. Something that I had put between the lines because it was what I was doing. The emotion of life.

Not one simple emotion, the whole complex spectrum was there. I just hadn’t seen it.


Day 16
Aftermath of Technique

Saturday. I sat about the game store in town and listened with half an ear at children that thought I was god. They approached me with a sacred reverence and begged for my attention with offerings of food and drink and cash. I allowed them to continue on, benevolence flowing from my feet to wash away their sins.

I have always reeked of conceit. And with good reason. They tell me that I am greater than they. I know that I am worth what I am worth. But they see something different. They see something in me that I can only guess at. So I begin to want to become whatever it is that they see. I can live the life that others think that I should, because it is important that promises be kept, even when you are not the one that made the promise.

Justifications for my behavior circle through my mind. Ways that I can convince others of my true purpose, of my true self. Nothing presents itself. The packaging is all wrong. My style, my sense of self out-weighs my words. If I broke down in the middle of the quad screaming people would merely assume that I am doing a Rodney bit. They’re all Rodney bits.

I am worshiped like a cult figure by people I have never met. They may not always like me, in fact I am hated as often as not, but never for me. Nobody sees me, they see the visage that I have created, the visage that has me trapped within.

So I sit down and ask myself what writing is supposed to do for me, and I get this idea of a way of presenting myself. A way that will be about me, that will cut down the visage.


Day 21
Beginning Again

Essay #2 is due in one hour. I’m something like 400 words away from making the six page minimum. I want to list other things but find if hard to go back and change what I’ve already laid down. It would be wrong to delete the words, to make them disappear from the record of existence. They only live by being read. They only breathe if I say that they do.

I ask myself questions, sometimes direct, other times not. Will the readers see something here that I did not place here? Will they laud my skills above their actual existence or will they miss the most important part.

What begins as a dialogue about writing ends as a dialogue about being writing. The words that are printed are and are not me at the same time. I give them life and they walk out to find lives of their own. They carry within each of them a meaning that is singular and part of the whole.