The Essay Writing Process: A “Radical” Reflection

I began the project attempting to explore the very broad topic of “advice.” Though I started with no immediate connection to advice, I hoped that through this project I would become an expert on both giving and receiving advice, and I admit that my initial approach was rather analytical and journalistic. This would slowly change over the course of the semester as I became more familiar (and more comfortable) with the essay as a truly personal form.

While there were numerous images, stories, trends, and potential avenues that appeared within the first stages of researching and drafting my essay (such as online quizzes, chat rooms, the history of advice, and advice via social media), one source kept drawing me in (if only in name): “Dear Abby.” After finding the “Dear Abby” archive online, anonymous advice letters became my primary focus for the project, and the content of the letters provided the “raw materials” for many iterations of the essay. Although the archive became, in many ways, a window into the personal lives of others, I struggled to find my own personal connection to advice.

Many of our class discussions aimed at defining what an essay is, or more often what it isn’t, revealed a continuous resurfacing of “the personal” as a necessary component of the essay. Readings such as Scott Russell Sanders’ “The Singular First Person” and Sara Levine’s “The Self on the Shelf” put the subjectivity of the essayist front and center, with Sanders warning: “[You] had better speak from a region pretty close to the heart, or the reader will detect the wind of phoniness whistling through your hollow phrases” (125). In my first textual essay, I tried to establish this “region” by incorporating moments in my past when I have asked for advice. This would account for only a small portion of the essay, and ultimately I came out of the textual essay with a rather objective analysis of the advice letter through the “typology” I established by presenting the letters as a movement or practice occurring either before or after big life moments.

Whatever small amounts of “the personal” I did happen to incorporate into the first iteration were completely cut out from my audio essay. I found that when I went to read the piece out loud for the audio essay, I felt extremely exposed and vulnerable. It was the first time I’d ever said such personal thoughts or feelings aloud. Working through my own experiences with advice out loud in this way really changed my relationship to these experiences. I was very resistant to admit even my most “innocent” interactions with advice, so I went in a direction that was even more objective, distant, and journalistic than my first piece.

Going into the video essay drafting process, I knew that I wanted to challenge myself much more than I had been; I wanted to push myself outside of my “subjective” comfort zone, which is part of why I was very happy to read Marilyn Freeman’s “On the Form of the Video Essay.” In her piece, Freeman praises the video essay for its “reflexivity” and describes the video essay as a form that is “playful, irrational, and fragmented.” From this, and from watching more experimental and abstract pieces (such as Kristen Radtke’s “That Kind of Daughter” and Nick Twemlow and Robyn Schiff’s “Wolfvision”), I knew the video essay would provide a unique opportunity to bring in the personal. The video essay, in being more “playful” and “fragmented,” offered a means of exploring the heart of my personal, emotional connection to advice without necessarily stating it explicitly.

At the same time that I was exploring more personal connections to advice, I found a specific “Dear Abby” letter that truly spoke to me and my experiences with anxiety. Finding a letter to connect with proved to be a worthwhile, creative, and lucrative entry point for the video essay, as the language of the letter itself also connected to the footage I was already playing with: feelings of sickness, that “anxiety can feed on itself,” and images related to the “adrenaline rush” of anxiety.

With the video essay, I also wanted to explore different textures visually. I felt that the old footage I found through the Prelinger Archive connected to deep, and otherwise unexplainable, feelings of anxiety by eliciting similar responses physically (an x-ray video of a wrist turning slowly in circles, harrowing shots from great heights, and footage of cells moving through the body at a microscopic level). While collecting visual “artifacts” for my video essay, I was very conscious of stepping outside of obvious or objective illustrations of anxiety. I truly wanted to experiment with Cynthia Ozick’s notion of a “free mind at play,” even if that “play” ended up being more dark and visceral. Though this didn’t come out as much as I had hoped for with the narrative for my video essay (I found myself still censoring quite a bit in that regard), the visual components helped push me out of my comfort zone. By creating an “experimental” visual collage to accompany the narrative, I felt I was able to communicate feelings, emotions, and experiences that, in previous iterations, I was having a difficult time putting into words.

In my final textual piece, I wanted to take the “personal” aspect I had cultivated in the video essay and push it even further. I wanted my final reworking of the essay to be drastically more personal, experimental, and raw, and less “polished” than my first textual piece. During the drafting of the final piece, I had two specific pieces in mind: Annie Dillard’s “Total Eclipse” and Leslie Jamison’s “The Empathy Exams.” I admired Dillard for her ability to write in such abstract and often disorienting ways while still remaining present and grounded in her piece, and I wanted to emulate Jamison’s raw and, in some ways, confrontational approach to the “the personal.” In this way, Dillard became a model for how I wanted my essay to “sound” and Jamison a model for jumping off into the deep end of subjective emotion and experience.

In the end, I feel extremely proud of the radical revision of my original essay. It was very uncomfortable to write, and that is exactly what I was aiming for. Though I started out rather guarded and uncertain of my own personal position as an essayist, I feel that through working in different media, I’ve been able to experiment with and explore “a region pretty close to the heart.” I’m grateful to have experienced such creative growth in this way.