A Response From a Young Writer
- Lauren B
- 0
- on Oct 27, 2022
Something I found intriguing in my first letter, Your First Line, was that it encouraged you to embrace complexity. Colum McCann likens writing your first line to, “being told to walk a tightrope. Go ahead, then, walk the tightrope! Relax yourself into the tension of the wire.” Often in writing it’s very easy to lose yourself in the complexity of writing an essay. If you find yourself stuck it’s easier to give up than to keep going and struggle. Then even when you’re struggling you still want to give up because the ideas are coming to you as they should. This is a problem many face when writing in college. Throughout elementary, middle, and high school you’re taught a formula for the perfect essay; how it must start, what the middle parts are, and how it should end. You start with an outline of everything you want to write about. But in college, this formula isn’t as common. The topics are more complex, teachers have higher expectations, and it’s not as simple as it once was. The freedom you get when writing in college is high, as long as it relates to the basic prompt you can write whatever you want. Unfortunately, this freedom means you may not know a lot about your topic and what you want to argue. That makes it really hard to craft an outline or even write that first line. You go from knowing exactly what to do to not even knowing where to start. We rely on our outlines to provide structure to our essay and give us something to work with but if you don’t have that what do you have? The answer, complexity. It’s hard to write without an outline or a clear idea of your topic and you don’t want to do it but if you do it will eventually give way to something that you can be proud of. You could think of a new way to view something that you previously didn’t think about. Not to mention you don’t have to start at the beginning. A pro of not working with a defined outline is the ability to write in whatever order you want. This makes it easier to understand what you want to write about as you go. However just because you don’t have an exact outline doesn’t mean that you can overwrite to an extreme amount. As McCann puts it, “Don’t stuff the world into your first page.” When you don’t have a clear idea of what you want to write this can lead to a lot of confusion and shoving details into places where they don’t belong. You tend to write everything you’re thinking of that relates to what you want to write without any care for organization. Then, because of people’s unwillingness to go back and redo what they first wrote, the mess of words stays in your writing. This overwhelms the reader, as well as can confuse them on what you’re arguing about. You must let the reader discover your story/argument as they read and if you have an introduction be concise and to the point. But at the same time leave the reader wanting more. Walking a tightrope will always feel jarring at first but eventually, you’ll get better at it, just like you will with writing.
