essays malaise

tomorrow is the day i'm finishing up the last 4 of my essays, and i can say with relative authority that writing the personal essay/statement of purpose/ goals assessment/ whatever the school wishes to call it is the most difficult part of the application. to me, they're all the same. that is to say, i am using the same method to write each essay. Vince Gotera's article has been a humongous influence on my method. consequently, i think i wrote a damn good essay because of it.

ay, but there are some of my schools that don't fit in this paradigm. they want specific questions addressed. they have word count limit. or a page limit. or they want me to write an essay on what graduate study means to me. which excludes part of the applicant pool who, like me, already have a graduate degree. what does it mean to me? it means i already got my graduate degree. (woo hoo?) but that's not what an MFA degree means to me.

what i want to write about is the passion i get from writing. putting words down on a page and change something. change myself? the reader? i don't care.

part of me wants to write something to make someone go, "what the hell? is this writer messing with me?" someone actually said this in a writing group recently. the workshopper wrote in the margin, "i wonder if you are messing with our heads." it was a fantastic compliment. if i can make you think twice about something i wrote, make you wonder whether the character is sexy or weird, tangible or a dream, trustworthy or a liar, then i think that's good. i've done what i want to do. that's where my passion is. getting better at messing with people's heads.

because i'm not a scientist or a philosopher or a filmmaker or a politician, this is my only platform to get people thinking. as much as i'd love to be the next jk rowling or charlaine harris or stephanie meyer (no offense to any of those writers),  i'd rather be the next amy hempel or raymond carver or shirley jackson. hell, shirley jackson had piles of hate mail sent to her when she published "the lottery" in the new yorker in 1948 (detailed in come along with me). i want that response. i spend way too much personal time attempting to please other people. writing allows me to piss them off. is that what shirley had in mind? i'd like to think so.

anyway, back to essays. 8 down, 4 to go.