I have written the pre-draft to my first draft. Now to go back and make it a serviceable piece of first-round writing.
This is, hands down, the most difficult essay I've ever written. It's partly because the story I'm working with is absolutely cracked out (I mean literally; the resolution comes in the form of an opium overdose), but it's also because I've never broken the writing process down in so much detail before. Analytical questions, then just the intro paragraph, then a conference to figure out how to find and organize evidence, and that's all before even approaching a first draft.
I thought I would easily just write the final essay at my first go. Now I'm wondering how the hell I've written at all without doing all of this.
So it's really, really an incredible thing to be able to work in so much detail on my writing. Which gets me thinking, of course, about what kind of writing it is I actually want to do. That I want to write is unquestionable; it's the only thing that makes any kind of sense to me, and yet, I know fiction is just not the way to go. I like dealing with ideas, not vaguely rendering them in tropes. Essays were too literary, journalism lacked universality, academic writing was dull, detailed, and formulaic. I wanted insights. I want
truth.
The closest I got to finding my indefinable prey was ethnography. Suddenly, all the scraps I'd been gleaning from everything else I read seemed to fall together into the same piece. It's well-researched and deeply-rooted in fact but uses those facts to build theories – theories which not only explain life but can be beautifully, perfectly written. It mixes the skill of fine writing with the pursuit of understanding the world and its problems. Not some abstract, ridiculous problem like "what is the self?" but a real problem like "why do such a high percentage of black people live in poor neighborhoods?"
I want to go there.
But I also see its limitations. Ethnographic methods inherently yield culturally-based explanations. They can read too much into too little. Quantitative analysis is required at some point when it comes to understanding things. And ultimately, I'm not really being exposed to any careers outside of academia anyway; I don't know what the hell I actually want to do.
Of course, all this nattering on is, practically speaking, absurd. I won't figure anything out until I actually try a lot of things. Thinking about it isn't going to get me anywhere, truly. But it's like Eisenhower said: Plans are useless, but
planning is indispensable.
And easier to write up than my Expos draft. :P
