In-The-Moment Personal Essay

 REVISION OF A PERSONAL ESSAY                                               

You have written, under time constraints, two personal essays: one, a month ago, about a time you felt deeply, or thought deeply, the way Hester thought deeply in The Scarlet Letter; the other last week, when you wrote a personal essay in response to either a Whiman poem or a Dickinson poem—for most, that essay was about the way some external thing affected you internally.

Now I’d like you to drastically revise and somewhat expand one of those essays into a more considered work.  If you want to, you can start over from scratch and write about something new, but I would recommend using what you did before as a brainstorming session at least.

All but a very, very few of the essays I read seemed to me to have the same weakness, and could be improved in the same way, by making them much more focused on specific moments, by moving down to the bottom rungs of the ladder of abstraction and the ladder of temporal speed, so that as much as possible you write about particular sensory details at a moment-by-moment speed, with very little in the way of abstraction or summary.

All language is based to some extent on abstraction, of course, and we can never match the speed of our writing exactly to the speed of our living (though I think Nabokov claims that Tolstoy comes close on that second score), but what I mean is the difference between:

I used to be a great soccer player.  From the time I was seven, it was a part of my identity.  I loved to run, to kick and to win.  My nickname was Pele,  When I broke my leg just after scoring the winning goal in a game against Needham last fall, it was like my whole world changed.  I couldn’t run around the way I used to do, and maybe I never would again.  Instead I sat at home and streamed really bad movies on Netflix.  My mom made me tea and I popped painkillers like they were popcorn.  My body was in pain anyway, and my mind was in pain, too.  I was numb. I wasn’t a soccer star anymore.  Maybe I would never be a soccer player again. I couldn’t even remember what it was like to kick a soccer ball.

and this:

I sprinted in from the left and leaped into the air, scissoring my legs and kicking the ball.  I just had time to see the ball sail into the upper left corner of the net, and to wonder how I was going to land—on my back?—when a guy on the other team slammed into my legs, sending me spinning like a pinwheel flicked with a fingernail.  I flipped around; when I hit the ground my left leg was at an awkward angle.  Just at that moment, a different guy on the other team slammed into me, and my lower leg snapped like a toothpick. 

As the sun set three days later, I was lying in bed, in pain, popping  painkillers like they were popcorn while Home Alone 3 played in low-resolution on the screen of the iPad that rested on my good leg.

Maybe that second passage isn’t as good—but it’s the kind of thing I want you to aim for.

Rough revised draft due: Mon/Tues, 12.19/20.11                        

Final Draft due: Thursday, 12/22/11