Essay Camp Day 5

Enough talk. Let's make something.

James Baldwin, photographed by Michael Ochs in 1965.

“When you’re writing, you’re trying to find out something which you don’t know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don’t want to know, what you don’t want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.” — James Baldwin

Welcome to the fifth and final day of Essay Camp!

My dear friends and fellow writers—thank you so much for joining me this week for this impromptu session of Essay Camp. As we meet once more on this final day, I hope that those of you who chose to participate can you feel proud of what you accomplished. Even if you did little more than dip a toe into Lake Essay and then run back to your cabin to watch Netflix, you still showed up 😉

If you did attend camp, I hope you managed to write this week. If you did the writing assignments, you might have anywhere from 100 to 6,000 new words, more or less, to work from and play around with, which you didn’t have before.

If you worked in Rebel Mode (as I did for the first time during camp!), I hope you managed to make some progress with your project or gained a clearer idea of what you want to do with it.

If you did the reading assignments, I hope you found at least one essay that inspired you, made you think, or gave you permission to try something new in your own writing. If you read something not on any of the reading lists that inspired you, feel free to share it in the comments below, with a link if possible!

But camp isn’t quite over yet! So, if you’re planning to write today, whether through freewriting, by prompt, or in Rebel Mode, it might be a good idea to go ahead and do that now before continuing. You know what to do, so go ahead and write. The rest can wait.

Finished? Great. Let’s continue.

Now that we’ve reached the end of this very special session of Essay Camp, where you have very generously allowed me to repeat coursework to make it possible—thank you!—the time has finally come to read over what you’ve written and see what your nets have pulled up from the deep.

As you read back over your drafts from the past five days, either now or over the next few weeks, try to see them from a little distance, and with as little judgement as possible, while please taking note of the following. You can even jot down some notes in a journal or Google doc if you like:

What have I chosen to write about?

Is what I’ve written personal, general/topical, or both?

What different topics or stories are represented here?

How, if at all, are any of them connected to one another?

Do I notice any common images or themes that emerge or recur?

Is there something here I’m drawn to write more about?

Do any lines, passages, descriptions, or turns of phrase that I have written appeal to me or “feel true?”

Again, please feel free to jot down these observations as notes if you find it helpful.

Like poems, essays have their own logic. We do not have to have it all figured out before we put pen to paper, or lay our fingers on the keyboard. As Joan Didion said: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” James Baldwin, quoted above, worked in much the same way.

Therefore, do not be afraid to write without first understanding why. Things like understanding, themes, and conscious intent can all come later. In the beginning, it’s best not to worry too much about crafting sentences, although of course that matters, but rather to simply employ oneself as a stenographer to our own memories, ideas, and thoughts at first. You have to harvest the vegetables before you can make the soup!

A freewriting exercise like the Five Things prompt is not supposed to feel like throwing pots on a ceramicist’s wheel—expert and graceful, with a finished and useful thing resulting at the end. At this stage, it’s more like digging up the clay. You’re mining the necessary minerals. Later on is when you can make or refine the raw material. You must dry it, grind it, make a slurry, pour it through a screen, let it stand, knead it, etc. Then you can try to make your pot on the wheel. Then, and only then, will you find out how good your clay is.

If your clay turns out to be poor— it doesn’t hold together, or it’s insubstantial, and you can’t make anything with it—don’t worry, and definitely don’t panic; it just means that you will need to work on your clay production, or spend some more time digging it up, or find a better spot to dig in.

For now however, let’s see if we can’t make a little pot or two with the material we’ve already dug up. Let’s try to write something essay-shaped from what we’ve already written.

Before we get to the final assignment for today, and the homework for the coming week—yes, there will be homework! Sorry!—let’s review what we’ve covered the past four days.

On the first day, we gave ourselves permission to begin; to put one word down after another, and to do so without fear of judgment from ourselves or from others. Or at least that was the goal. We allowed ourselves to be as stupid, untalented, uncool, crazy, and boring as we needed to be in order to get the words out. As Margaret Atwood said: “A word after a word after a word is power.” We decided to tune out all external noise about what is right or wrong, good or bad, when it comes to writing, and to focus only on telling the truth.

On the second day, we took advice from Lucille Clifton that asking questions rather than thinking we must already know the answers can be a good way to approach our writing. By writing for two days in a row, we began to establish or reestablish our own writing practice. I invited you to think of your rough drafts as seeds planted in the shelter of a greenhouse, that may or may not be cultivated and replanted to form a garden one day. Our job was not to worry about garden design just yet, but rather to focus on shaking the seeds loose and sticking them in the soil. We reminded ourselves that a writing practice must often be created and re-created many times, but that what mattered most was the consistent decision to return and begin again, even as our circumstances change.

On the third day, we took inspiration from Deborah Levy, who said that in order to become a writer, she “had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.” In the spirit of speaking up and finding our own voices, or maybe even a different version of our own voices—louder or softer than we previously imagined—we tried to spend a little longer in that exploratory, generative phase; that strange and unknown place where words come from when we’re not yet trying to “be good” or “do it right.” Whether writing personally or topically, the idea was to try and strengthen the connection to our intuitive selves, that weird and wonderful place in all of us where many of our best ideas come from.

On the fourth day we talked about different essay structures and how to begin to think about revising what we’ve written. We examined some common types of essays including the braided essay, the lyric essay, the fragmented essay, the narrative essay, and what some call the mimetic essay—an essay that takes the form of something else, like a letter or a questionnaire. There are other forms too, like the vignette essay, and one used by Hemingway in his early days.

We remembered that all essays, no matter their structure, must have three things: a beginning, a middle, and an end:

The beginning draws you in.

The middle holds your interest.

And the ending sees you out again with a sense of closure.

All essays, no matter their type, structure, narrative, or lack thereof, will always have these three things. If each does their job well, then details like topic, style, or formal label become relatively unimportant.

We were encouraged to develop our own creative “muscle memory,” so that we can work by following what feels right, and figure our the reason or justification for it later. We were invited to ask ourselves if any parts of what we’d written so far felt like a beginning, a middle, or an end, and perhaps to begin arranging them accordingly. As Virginia Woolf said: “Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” And in the words of Leonard Cohen, whom I quoted in another session: “The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines.”

Now is the time to arrange the pieces that have come our way; to cut the gem.

I would like you to take what you’ve written this week and finish at least one essay based on the collected material. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to exist and be done. Most people will only use some of what they wrote, but if you feel you can incorporate everything, feel free to give that a try as well. What’s important is that you tailor your plans to your schedule. Take on something manageable, that you can finish by the end of the year, if you’re looking at something under 4,000 words. Getting into the habit of finishing things, even before you have the skill to make them good enough to satisfy your own tastes, is more important than almost any other skill you will learn in writing.

So without further ado, on this last day of Essay Camp, let’s get down to work.

“You can not describe anything without betraying your point of view, your aspirations, your fears, your hopes. Everything.” — James Baldwin

Writing Assignment, Day 5

Part 1

Please write a Five Things draft. If you have avoided writing one this week, maybe now is the time to give it a try? Please write all five things, even if you can only manage one word or short sentence each. When you’re done, read back over your drafts from today and the previous four days, and see if you like anything that you’ve written. Does any of it feel true? Is there anything that surprises you? Are there any topics that you’d like to choose for an essay? Is there an essay here already, or the seeds of an essay, or an idea? Pay attention to any sentences or passages that might serve as a beginning, a middle, or an end. Does anything sound like an opening? A turning point? A kicker?

Alternate Option 1: Freewriting

If you’re not working with the Five Things prompt, proceed to freewriting instead.

Set a timer for whatever amount of time you have—ten minutes, thirty minutes, an hour—and write whatever comes. Try not to look back at what you’ve written. Keep moving forward, without worrying whether what you’ve written is good or not, until you’ve reached the end of your allotted time.

In case you need a prompt:

Write about a moment in your life when you decided to take action.

Describe what it was like as a kid when you stayed home from school.

Write about a time when someone stood you up.

Describe a memory that involved pumpkins, zucchinis, squash, or gourds.

Write about a time when you broke the law.

Write about the room you would need in order to fix everything that is wrong with your life, and what’s in it.

Describe a moment when everything changed.

Write about a particular autumn day.

Write about a particular autumn night.

Write about a funeral.

Write about a wedding.

Write about a birth.

Write about fire, or about a fire that you witnessed.

Write about moss.

Alternate Option 2: Rebel Mode

This is the last sprint of the week, so work on your own project as much as you can.

“Write a sentence as clean as a bone.” —James Baldwin

“The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.” —Zadie Smith

Part 2: Post Camp Revision

Now it is time to edit. You can do this today, or you can schedule some time to work on it next week or in the coming weeks. Time is the best editor, but use it wisely. Taking a little space from your work can sometimes yield answers if you’re feeling stuck, but our goal is to have a finished essay by the end of the year if you’re aiming for 4,000 words or under. You can take as much time as you need, but please plan to finish your essay at some point, preferably as soon as possible.

If your drafts were written by hand, now may be a good time to type them up. Feel free to add or change things as you go, and expand on what you’ve already written. To begin the revision process, focus on what is working for you already. This may be an idea, a sentence, a whole paragraph, or an entire passage.

One method you can try is to cut and paste the parts you like into a new document, or re-type the sentences from these sections while changing and adding as you go. See where there are holes. Do you need a better beginning? A longer or more coherent middle? An end, or a stronger end?

Your essay can be very short like a Hemingway vignette, very long like Suzanne Rivecca’s Ugly, Bitter, and True, (and if it is, give yourself as much time as you need to write it), or it might fall somewhere in the middle. It’s up to you. Think about the different kinds of essays we’ve read and discussed, and see if there are any common forms you’d like to try. Do you want to combine different subjects into a braided essay, especially if one topic can serve as a kind of metaphor, mirror, or symbol for the other? Do you have a story that is best served when told as a cohesive, single, chronological narrative? Do you want to lean into a fragmented quality, or experiment with the mimetic form? Do you want to add more context to your poetic images, or would you prefer to remove the specific context of your imagery and let your essay develop along less logical and more lyrical, poetic lines?

Remember, your essay does not have to be perfect, or even very good. Take the pressure off. It just has to be done.

Optional Deadlines:

For this session, I’m cutting us all a little slack, and saying that any essay that is going to be around 4,000 words or fewer should be finished by the end of the year. For anything longer, well, that will depend, but maybe try to aim for a draft by February or March.

Important note: if you don’t like anything you’ve written this week, that is good news! There are a million terrible sentences inside every writer’s mind, and you need to get all of them out first before you can get to the good ones. You are now that much closer to the words you’ll feel good about. If you really and truly hate everything you wrote this week, you can put those words away for now. Shape them into a short essay if you can, even a very bad one, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and save it. It doesn’t represent you or your potential, it’s just you practicing. If you already hate it, then the stakes are low, so you might as well do it anyway, right? Keep writing, and then revisit what you’ve written in a month or two. See what you think of it, or your new material, then. You might find that your words have improved with age. If not, no worries. Just keep writing; keep digging your way through.

“I have to finish it in order to know whether it deserves to survive.” — Leonard Cohen

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Reading Assignment, Day 5

For inspiration, feel free to look back at any of the essays shared this week. You can also draw inspiration from fiction, poetry, or any other written form.

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Camp Check-Out

Thank you so much for joining me this week, especially on such short notice. Thank you for writing along, for creating community for each other, and for sharing your progress. I always give the advice to show up to camp, even if you’re bedraggled and filled with doubt, and this time I was the bedraggled one, and I thank you for your grace in that.

Please keep showing up. Please keep writing.

Much love,

Summer

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