I was thinking about writing a whole book in the same vein as Daemons and Radicals, which is basically an academic essay, but there are some problems with that idea. One problem is that it would be a lot of work....it would mean basically writing a long thesis...I wouldn't mind that/// it's something I want to do anyway - I want to write a thesis, and I've already started writing it, but a thesis should only be converted into a book once it's gone through the process of being academically validated. If I was to write a thesis as a book, and just publish it on my own intitiative, with no expert feedback or mentorship, it would be like publishing a rough draft...it wouldn't be the best quality, and I want to write something good. The other big problem with writing a book like that is to do with copyright and attribution. You can't quote from academic and literary texts in the way you would when you're writing an academic essay for school, when you write a book. You have to get permission from the publishers.
but one of the main issues is time. I want to write something fairly quickly. I was listening to a conversation between Ben Shapiro and Dave Rubin recently and Ben Shapiro was saying that he writes a book in a month, or I think he even said he can write a book in about 10 days if he works on it full-time. I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be that quick, but I'd like to get it done fairly quickly. I think personal essays are the best medium for me to be able to do that, because it's the format that comes most naturally to me.
mind you, I haven't even started. I just have the idea - the idea of the book - but I have no ideas about the individual essays.
Maybe I could make it autobiographical like Lena Dunham's Not that Kind of Girl (2014), which I quite enjoyed, by the way. I know she received a lot of criticism about some of the content, and I understand the criticism, but I read the book before I heard the criticism, and the impression I got when I was reading the book is that, in the problematic parts and other parts, Lena was using some creative licence...there was an aspect of performance about it. It seemed pretty clear that there was an element of truth to it, but there was also a creative aspect.
or maybe I could use Montaigne's, or Emerson's or Orwell's essays as models. I really admire Emerson's essays. I find them very uplifting and profound...I feel a sense of refreshment when I read his essays, as if I have a gift that I didn't know I had and he makes me aware of it||| He makes me aware of the richness of life. I don't think I could write with his gravitas and authority though.
I was just looking through a book I have called The Next American Essay (2003) edited and with notes by John D'Agata, and, to my delight, I found that it contains an essay by David Foster Wallace...but what I was looking for is something D'Agata writes in the notes about Emerson's turn to the essay. Apparently, at one stage his main outlet for writing was sermons, and he felt constrained by that...it seemed to him that what that format required was something decorous and fine sounding but kind of bloodless, with no real passion and verve. He was looking for 'a new literature', and he found it in the essay - his own particular style of essay (because an essay, in this sense, is a very malleable form). In the essay, Emerson found a medium in which, so he wrote in his journal, 'everything is admissable - philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism - all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation, highest and lowest personal topics: all are permitted, and all may be combined into one speech.'
Actually, The Next American Essay is a good illlustration of the versatility of the essay form. It's exactly as Emerson describes, with a few more textual forms included.
Generally, I respond well to freedom of expression - to being able to write whatever I want and in whatever way I want. It's also good to hone your writing skills though. I remember at uni, in first year English, we were taught how to properly write an academic essay - how to structure it. The lecturer was an expert in linguistics, so she really knew about structure and discourse and what constituted the praxis of writing an academic essay. I remember how much of a struggle it was, once I understood how I needed to structure an essay, to tranlsate my thoughts, and ideas and research, into that structure. The thoughts in my head were not organised like that, but they're all related in a certain way in my head. To pull the different parts out and fit them into the proper structure was really hard, because each idea or piece of information only makes sense in the place where it is in relation to all the other ideas in my mind.
but structure also helps. When you know how to use it, it guides you. I remember our lecturer saying that, if you're writing an essay and you get to a point where you're asking yourself the question, what am I going to write about next? it means that you haven't structured your essay well, because, when you set up an effective structure....it's like building a house....the builder never has to stop and think about what to do next.
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