@“Gaagaagiins”#p42121 Thanks for giving the time and thought to read my self-absorbed rant and offer a serious response!
I think I tend to be sort of an intuitive thinker and will often arrive at conclusions faster than I can consciously unpack the complex semi-conscious reasoning process that informed them. The way thoughts exist in my mind, there is not precisely a chronology of logic but multiple channels running simultaneously at roughly even volumes. Subject and predicate do not necessarily exist on the same channel at the same time; sometimes cause produces effect and sometimes (at least in terms of my ability to consciously unpack it) effect precedes cause. It can be a little overwhelming to try and express all this through formal writing, where point A must proceed to point Z in an agreed-upon linear fashion; sentences and paragraphs are chronological. We don’t read two sentences at once or read some of them backwards at random. Writing stands distinct from thought, as a photograph does from a natural vista at a moment in time; to write is to try and impose 2D structures and boundaries on a 3D or even 4D mass of thought, and hope you can at least capture the essence in the process.
At any rate, these things make structure and planning uniquely daunting prospects for me (I’m bloviating about this only because using my time and energy more constructively has been a serious concern in my life recently). In the end, I wrote the rough draft of my essay - as I usually write things - more or less from the hip, with a general sense of my destination and a mountain of notes, but letting one paragraph justify the next as they come. As I wrote (and rewrote, and excised) themes emerged. (In this case: “_Evangelion_ has a bifurcated identity as deeply personal expression and commercial trash; at its worst these aspects clash, and at its best they complement one another to create something uniquely uncanny that exceeds the sum of its parts; and the most honest way to assess this contradiction is to layer my emotional, personal experience with the work and my critical judgment side-by-side within the essay itself.”) When I return to the piece to edit it, I can now see its themes and attempt to accentuate them, while cutting down the parts that do not weave into the themes. If I wanted to turn it into an even longer-form essay, I could select additional material that expands, illustrates or contextualizes my thematic statements.
The main question this leaves me with is one of personal efficiency. The rough draft took way, way longer to complete than it actually took to _write_: if I removed note-taking, discussion, reflection, research (of which I didn’t even do all that much), difficulty focusing, and - more than anything - anxiety-driven procrastination driven by the fear of producing something _mediocre_ or _inferior_, something that will _look stupid_ and _lame_ make people _laugh at me_ and call me a _worthless disgusting freak retard_, even if only inside their heads - if I removed all that, the under-5,000 word essay I wrote across three weeks could’ve been written in a single weekend, maybe even a single day. Once I actually got to writing instead of being kneecapped by the fear of having nothing to say, of _being_ “nothing to say” in some overwhelming existential sense, I simply _wrote_. And now that it’s _written_, I can identify the themes and structure that exist or are at least hinted at or _could_ exist in this thing I extracted from my head, and create through iteration. The truly hard part is speaking into the void, turning a blank page into words; sculpting the words from words is so much easier.
I’m trying to take a lesson from this as I try to make writing, and at least somewhat more serious writing, a bigger part of my life going forward. Writing is a thing I can do that I don’t totally suck at. The more I care about something I’m trying to write, the more I _want_ it to be good, the more emotionally daunting it is - often to the point of paralysis. I’m trying to combat the paralysis. Accept that a route can be plotted _after_ I start walking. Push myself to walk farther. Build the muscles. Have goals, but don’t compare every step and every mile to professional athletes and assume the effort is pointless because I don’t have the right bone structure or something.
Anyway. I don’t know if what I ended up writing will be one of the Great Essays of Pop Culture Analysis, but _maybe_ it won’t be just another disposable piece of Content? Maybe. I hope.