For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.
What I think is important about essayists - about the essay, as opposed to a lot of personal writing that kind of finds its way into public view - is that the material really has to be presented in a processed way.
My writing process is a mix of research, personal experiences, washing the dishes, raising kids while thinking - then writing.
The essays are different because ultimately it's things I'm interested in, and I'm really just writing about myself and using those subjects as a prism.
I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.
Because of social media, we have a lot of personal essays floating around; you see them on Facebook: everyone's either reading them or writing them. Some of them are great; some of them are diary entries put forth as essays.
Since childhood, I wrote a lot of fiction, a lot of stories, but I most loved writing essays.
Writing, for me, is an inherent part of understanding the material on a deeper level.
The point of essays is the point of writing anything. It's not to tell people what they already think or to give them more of what they already believe; it's to challenge people, and it's to suggest alternate ways of thinking about things.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.