In a Personal Essay mood
Apr. 27th, 2026 12:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
witchpoetdreamerI've been working on a few personal essay-type posts, and honestly? Writing personal essays is hard! I'm good at yapping out of the blue like that, blogging in a more journal capacity, but writing essays is a whole different thing! I have multiple ideas that all relate together that I'm trying to put together in some kind of narrative that pleases me, and it's not easy at all! I already had the utmost respect for creative non-fiction writers, I love reading their essays, but writing them is a whole different thing!
I got two working titles in development right now: "Basic White Girl Lore" and "AI Witchhunt". Will they be good? Not sure yet, but I'm enjoying writing them. I've written a lot of essays at Uni, but it's different to write something with a lot of research and citations and writing something that is just... well, personal! More of an opinion piece/autobiography than an actual paper. It does help that, if I ever am mentioning something in my essays, I can just link them in the post itself, no need for MLA formatting at the end (I do enjoy that part of writing essays too, but I don't think it reads as well in a blog post).
So ya, lots of writing going on, and a lot of it is just rewriting and editing. I think Basic White Girl is most likely to be the first one out. It's basically (ha) a retrospective of my personal enjoyment of pop culture since being a teen, and figuring out how to start the essay has been the hardest in this case. That and figuring out how to properly convey both feelings and facts that have impacted how I view pop culture now compared to before.
Writing skills are a really interesting thing to develop. The words are all there, it looks like it should be much easier than it is, just a question of learning how to arrange them a certain way and boom, voila, something good gets out. But it's not. And it's so hard to even convey feelings about writing without regurgitating what other people have already written or said about it before. Every writer does say that writing is hard, writing takes time, etc, but the ways it's hard and the ways it takes time are so different for every writer that it's almost impossible to truly understand until you experience it yourself. What is hard for me is like a breeze to someone else but they struggle where I don't. I think I'm pretty good at maintaining a good flow in my writing, it's something I've been told a few times before too. But I do struggle with run-on sentences (French sentences can go forever, it's a cultural thing XD). If I don't consciously think about it, I will rarely think of using a period as punctuation. Semi-colon and parentheses, my beloved. To the end of my Uni years, anytime a teacher would give me back my essays, it was always with at least one run-on sentence comment. I don't think that will ever change. Maybe it's a glimpse into my writing voice?
In any case, I'll go back to my essays now and see what comes of them.
I got two working titles in development right now: "Basic White Girl Lore" and "AI Witchhunt". Will they be good? Not sure yet, but I'm enjoying writing them. I've written a lot of essays at Uni, but it's different to write something with a lot of research and citations and writing something that is just... well, personal! More of an opinion piece/autobiography than an actual paper. It does help that, if I ever am mentioning something in my essays, I can just link them in the post itself, no need for MLA formatting at the end (I do enjoy that part of writing essays too, but I don't think it reads as well in a blog post).
So ya, lots of writing going on, and a lot of it is just rewriting and editing. I think Basic White Girl is most likely to be the first one out. It's basically (ha) a retrospective of my personal enjoyment of pop culture since being a teen, and figuring out how to start the essay has been the hardest in this case. That and figuring out how to properly convey both feelings and facts that have impacted how I view pop culture now compared to before.
Writing skills are a really interesting thing to develop. The words are all there, it looks like it should be much easier than it is, just a question of learning how to arrange them a certain way and boom, voila, something good gets out. But it's not. And it's so hard to even convey feelings about writing without regurgitating what other people have already written or said about it before. Every writer does say that writing is hard, writing takes time, etc, but the ways it's hard and the ways it takes time are so different for every writer that it's almost impossible to truly understand until you experience it yourself. What is hard for me is like a breeze to someone else but they struggle where I don't. I think I'm pretty good at maintaining a good flow in my writing, it's something I've been told a few times before too. But I do struggle with run-on sentences (French sentences can go forever, it's a cultural thing XD). If I don't consciously think about it, I will rarely think of using a period as punctuation. Semi-colon and parentheses, my beloved. To the end of my Uni years, anytime a teacher would give me back my essays, it was always with at least one run-on sentence comment. I don't think that will ever change. Maybe it's a glimpse into my writing voice?
In any case, I'll go back to my essays now and see what comes of them.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 07:20 pm (UTC)I think including your writing idiosyncrasies in a personal essay would make it more 'you'.
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 07:56 pm (UTC)Run on sentences: I still remember a comment from one of my profs in uni - "That is the longest sentence I have ever seen." But there were a lot of semi-colons!
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 10:59 pm (UTC)I'm looking forward to reading some of your CNF! Hmm, you're kind of inspiring me to post some older stuff from my CNF class... I wrote some of my favorite things that quarter, even if they were decidedly weird (in the best way).
EDIT: Nearly forgot to mention that I SUPPORT your excessive use of run-ons and semi-colons... my two best friends, run-ons and semi-colons...
no subject
Date: 2026-04-27 11:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-04-28 01:33 am (UTC)