In my writing, I am best described as a fourth-rate Douglas Adams. I like to start my writing off with a pithy half-sarcastic line, and then develop it in odd ways. I’ve done this for a long time, probably ever since I started reading Douglas Adams in the fifth or sixth grade. I love the odd devices involved in his writing, I aspire to some day be a fully second-rate Douglas Adams.

But that’s enough about my style. When writing, I generally don’t like producing structured, school style pieces. I don’t practice writing things quite often enough, and probably the only reason that I am able to write nearly so well is because I read prodigiously. The type of writing which I am skilled at is the type of writing so common in my favorite writing excercises, the ones we did in my 7th and 8th grade English class. It was Prompt Writing — with a time limit very similar to that of our daily writing — but with very nonstandard prompts. Prompts would almost always be things like “the wind blew softly,” or “but the door wouldn’t budge.” These were just the right amount to produce an idea, but not enough to limit the freedom of the writers, something very clear in the tremendous variety each prompt produced.

While I’m good at that type of writing, a Caleb Abhors an “Essay”. Or so the saying goes at least. I put “essay” in quotes, because I feel that the type of essay we write in school isn’t properly in line with the spirit of proper essay writing. (Essay comes from the Frech “essais,” which means tests, or explorations, but that’s beside the point here.) When I write an essay, I feel very limited by the structure, and I tend to feel much better just organically growing an argument. Perhaps I can clean up my writing later to be organized, but I don’t do very well producing a document that can be fit neatly into the standard frame of 5 paragraphs, or whatever scaffold is being used. My writing longs to be free!

And so that’s what I need to work on this year. I can make a powerful page or three exploring some idea, especially if I can put in lots of flowery description, but I can’t write something with a strong structure in it. So, my goals this year are to learn to plan out an argument or analysis more carefully, and to learn, by necessity, to tolerate the essay process.