First you resist. And Agonize. And hope the essay will go away if you ignore it. You clean your house, and sort the mail, and eye the essay from across the room, obliquely, hoping it won’t notice you there if you whistle and water the plants.
And you wait. You wait until the last minute. You wait until it is the day before the essay is due, and then you panic. You panic and yell at your dog, at your husband, at your kids. You walk around the house banging cupboards and cleaning very loudly. It is someone else’s fault that this essay is not done: It is your teacher’s fault who assigned you this stupid essay in the first place; It is your kids’ fault because they are too noisy and so you can’t even hear yourself think, let alone write a stupid essay; It is the stupid dog’s fault because he barfed on the rug and you had to clean it up instead of writing this stupid essay. And it is definitely your stupid husband’s fault whose stinky, dirty socks you have to waste all your time picking up instead of writing this, stupid, stupid essay!! You have to say all of this out loud, VERY loud, to write an essay. If you have a lot of self-control, you wait until no one is home to begin (Come on kids, let’s go to the park. Mommy has to write an essay.). The door slams shut. “Shit. Piss. Fuck!” You stomp around hollering at the top of your lungs, “I am not going to write this essay! I don’t have to write this essay! No one can make me write this essay! I hate this class; I hate this teacher; I hate my WHOLE STUPID LIFE!
When you are done yelling and banging and stomping, and are all good and tired out, you flump yourself into the couch and sit there breathing hard with your arms crossed. You swing your foot wildly. You imagine ways to escape. You imagine a tragedy that will save you-- a hurricane, an accident, a fire, a flood. You imagine hitting the highway, “I’m out of here,” and the note you will leave. You imagine buying a yellow school bus and filling it with spider plants, and jars of dried beans and pasta, and putting in a wooden floor, and a hammock, and a tiny woodstove, and traveling to New Mexico in it where you will live like a gypsy selling jewelry and reading astrology charts…and where you meet a man with kind eyes who plays a wooden flute, and you get pregnant with him and forget your other children, and your husband--but not your essay—though you can’t write it, of course, because you are nursing and smoking pot and sleeping out under the cold, white desert stars. Or you drive to California, and you stand in the waves, and you learn to surf, and you live on fish, and Tangueray, and oranges, and you never get old.
Now, you have wasted an hour. Now you have wasted a week and an hour. You eyeball the clock. You chew the side of your thumb. You count out how many hours are left before your class: 11 and three quarters. You can do this, you think to yourself. You have done this before.
You get up and put the coffee on. Then you climb to the attic with your cup, and you find the box with your yearbooks, and the one with your diplomas, and the one of all your school papers from sixth grade on, and you haul them all out of there and look at them. Papers from high school and middle school spread out around you with their 85’s and 92’s and 78’s ("Lisa, Why did you turn in a DRAFT as your final revision? Use more care!”) These are supposed to give you courage, prove your competence, give you ideas. Maybe you secretly hope that you will find a paper you’ve already written on this topic and somehow forgotten--a brilliant paper from that one class you had—what was it called?— the teacher who said that you should be a writer? A paper that you never turned it in for credit, but will be there near the bottom of the box all ready for you.
You have wasted two hours. Your knees ache. Your back hurts. Your coffee is stone cold. You climb down from the attic, warm up the coffee, and begin:
“How to Write an Essay
The most important part of a well-crafted essay is…..”
And then you stop. What is the most important part? What is it supposed to be, anyway? You remember a little about “thesis” and about the importance of having an “outline,” but isn’t there a “body paragraph” something or other – more than one of them—which makes you think of paragraphs with legs coming out the bottom. How are you supposed to write an essay if you can’t remember the rules? Now you are having a little bout of hopeless self-loathing: you are clearly stupid, and you can’t write and you never could write, and you know nothing whatsoever about grammar or punctuation, and you wouldn’t know an adverbial clause if he jumped off his sleigh and handed you an nicely packaged “LY” word from his big red bag. Sooooo…. you pour yourself a glass of wine at three-thirty in the afternoon and sit in the winter sunlight feeling like you’ve wasted your life.
Your family comes home and you lie to them. You say brightly, “I’m almost finished.” You play cards with your children. You mop the kitchen floor in penance, then you take a hot bath and stay up late goofing around on Facebook.
* * * * *
In the morning, you are desperate, repentant, and ready to write. An hour and a half before class, you open up a Word document and start typing. You dive in like an Olympian. Your heart pounds. Your fingers race. It’s you against the clock, but you are in the groove now, and the words flow out of you like out of some font of language, like you were made to do only this in life—to write with passion and power and grace. You are a word machine, you are a Craft-Mastah. Caffeine and a deadline are your best friends.
Five minutes before class you hit “print”—no spell-check, no proofread, no edit, no draft—It’s just you on your snowboard, taking the jump: there is one moment of flight, then you land it, or you don’t. It’s just you at half-court at the end of the game with the score tied: the ball has left your hand in a perfect arc, and the buzzer is sounding: the ball will or it won’t go in.
As you jam the pages of your essay into your bag and grab your coat, racing for the car (hoping there’s gas and that there isn’t a wide-load going up East), you vow to yourself, once again, that next time you have to write an essay, you’re going to start writing early . . . ..
