Dumb Paragraph that was Supposed to be Five Paragraphs.

Someone in another thread suggested the essay topic, "Walking for Pleasure". I was going to write five paragraphs, but I could not elaborate on the main idea of each paragraph. So I ended up with one paragraph that is neither vivid nor detailed. It doesn't sound too good. Whether you believe it or not, it sounded even worse before I edited it. But I don't have a copy of anything that was edited.

Some things I managed to do, which may or may not be good:
1. In the first clause, I put walking at the end for emphasis.
2. In the second clause, I used the phrase "give us pleasure" to avoid repeating the word enjoy.
3. In the second clause, I was going to change the word "give" to make it flow more smoothly, but I chose to use the more concise version, hoping that someone could confirm or deny whether it sounds unpleasant.
4. In the second sentence, I wrote three clauses with no conjunction and made the third one longer than the first two.
5. In the fourth sentence, I put "enjoy" at the end for emphasis.

Despite having made these decisions I know that what I have written is garbage, primarily because it does not provide much detail or imagery. Unfortunately, I was not able to do that, which is why I wrote this short paragraph instead of a whole essay.

Please help without insulting me. I have to be honest. I have written multiple essays before and never had as much difficulty as I am having now. But I have not been in the habit of straight writing since then, and that was over five years ago.

 

Listen. This paragraph isn't garbage. It's competently written - it gets the point across, and it flows well. It's fine.

My question is, what are you trying to do with this? What's the point of it? Is it meant to be persuasive, to convince people to go for walks? Is it just a rumination on how nice walking can be? Never mind detail or imagery. What are you trying to say? What do you want people to come away from this thinking or feeling? Knowing that should help you focus in on what else to include.

 

It's supposed to describe how walking is pleasurable, or to support the thesis that walking is pleasurable. It is just for practice.

 

You wanted to write five paragraphs describing how nice walking is? I mean ... there's your problem.

It doesn't seem to be doing you much good as practice. Maybe try something different.

 

As a follow-up thought, do you want to write essays or do you want to write prose? If you are focused on essays (or articles, or whatever else) never mind, but if prose is your goal, then you should probably practice by writing prose. Maybe a short story about going for a walk, rather than an essay.

 

So it is improper usage to use "we" the way I was using it?

 

1) OK.
2) Yep, that works.
3) I see nothing unpleasant about the word "give" or the phrase or sentence that it's in. What would you have replaced it with?
4) Sure, that's fine. I feel that you're worrying too much about structure, too early, but it's fine.
5) That's fine. I don't really think such a short paragraph needs a summing-up sentence, but I realize that you really want a much longer essay, and after a longer essay that summing-up might be useful.

But this is a lot of thinking about one little paragraph.

I suspect that you are trapped in perfectionism, and that you need to do a lot of "just write" to get out of that perfectionism.

What do I mean by "just write"? Well, here I go; I'm going to "just write":

I'm sitting at my desk. There's a Coke bottle at the end of the desk, a glass one. It has a white paper label, because it's a Mexican Coke, the kind with real sugar rather than high fructose corn syrup. The cap isn't in sight, which probably means that I dropped it on the floor and will step on it one of these days. The desk around the Coke bottle is slippery; it looks like I let it foam over.​

Meaningless and boring, right? Yep. But I wrote it easily, painlessly, in about two minutes. I could go on, and on, and on, and I might before the end of this post. One of my many reasons for suggesting that you plow through one hundred thousand words is so that you can get your writing machinery oiled up and functional again. Before you can strive for elegance or cadence or anything else, you need to simply be able to write.

I don't like the liter bottles--they're too big. A normal bottle (how big? twelve ounces?) is just about right for two glasses of Coke if I fill the glasses with ice, which is how I like Coke. The liter-sized bottles make me feel the gluttony of drinking Coke at all, and I tend to leave about a third of the Coke in the bottle, and then it's flat and what do I do with it?​

Still meaningless and boring, right? But thoughts are flowing up that might--or might not--be worth saying. I've often said that a first draft is raw materials--what matters at that point is the thoughts. If those thoughts are expressed gracefully, that's a nice bonus, but grace shouldn't be the first goal.

In fact, I like those old itty-bitty glass Coke bottles, the ones that are...maybe it's eight ounces? They remind me of a time when food cost real money even for people with comfortable incomes and a Coke cost enough to notice. They have a sort of nostalgia feel about them. Of course, my feeling that nostalgia probably comes from the hundreds and hundreds of Coke commercials and print ads that I've seen, so I feel like resisting it, but I usually don't.​

So now there are more raw materials. Gluttony, luxury, nostalgia, income and class, advertising. It's extremely unlikely that this actual silly piece I'm writing will go anywhere, but by touching on those things, I've caused them to slosh around the surface of my brain, and that might lead to something worth writing later. That's a big part of what "just write" does--you surface things and feelings and shine a light on them.

Of course, I shouldn't be drinking Coke. It's too much sugar, and I'd really like to avoid that whole Type 2 diabetes thing as I get older and older. There are safer ways to feed my nostalgia, like fried chicken. And Coke has the caffeine, of course, and the only way I'm likely to get rid of these frequent lightweight migraines is to cut down on caffeine. Well, reducing stress is another way, but even if I were calm and zen, the caffeine would still be an issue.​

Now, this is getting a bit more diary-like; I'm closer to talking to myself than anyone else. But more thoughts are being scooped off the surface of my brain--me aging, my health, dietary problem-solving, stress and migraines. But my reseponse to this is to say, "Blah de blah"--it seems simply boring. But, really the fact that I find it more boring than the previous paragraphs mean that those paragraphs could be worse, so, that's good.

But I am bored, and I've reached 300 words, which used to be my daily writing goal before the Highly Flavored Novel finally captured my attention. So if this were a "just writing" exercise, this is where I would stop and move to another topic. I'd probably read it over some other day to see if there's anything in there worth putting in my blog, but it would probably just fade away.

 

So if I replace it with "you" is that better?

 

Okay.

 

We vs I/You is really just more single-word obsession patchwork over what seems to be a systemic issue. I don't think it's going to be helpful to focus on that. It's easier to pick at things on a word-by-word basis, I know, but that can only get you so far.

 

I wanted to put emphasis on certain words. So that's why I used a pronoun.

 

It looks like the topic "Walking for Pleasure" is not one that allows me to generate much thought.

 

Maybe try a prompt from one of our previous comps?

 

Keep writing. Look how much I wrote about a simple Coke bottle. Just...write.

There's something that's stopping you from moving your fingers over the keyboard producing words that may have little or no meaning or value. You need to get over that. I don't know how, but you do.

My mother had a level of perfectionism, at times, that made her incapable of understanding how to do basic physical acts. For example, imagine that a stack of books was on a chair, and she need to sit on the chair. In her mind, that stack of books needed to go in a bookshelf. So a sequence of events that she could comprehend was her picking up the books, carrying them to the bookshelf, and putting them on the bookshelf.

Absent the clear bookshelf space, she could not comprehend the idea of picking up the stack of books and putting them somewhere else. The perfect act meant putting them on the shelf. Putting them on, say a table, or a different chair, was not perfect, so she couldn't comprehend it. The sentence, "Just pick them up and put them on the table," didn't parse for her. It was as if it were in another language, one that she didn't know.

I actually had to talk her through the physical motions ("OK, you've got two arms and two hands, right? Put your left hand under the left side of the bottom book. Put your right hand under the right side of the bottom book. Hold your hands stiff. Now straighten up. See how the books move with you? OK, now you finally get what I'm saying? Good.")

I feel that you have a similar issue with writing. When I say just write, I mean just write.

Did you read my "just write" post? Did the nonsense that I wrote repulse you to the extent that you can't bear to even think about it? Or...? What's going on?

 

Never mind what I wrote in this post.

 

For a long time I was not taking the advice, but I am taking it now, albeit not all of it, because some things elude me.

 

The act of writing is in itself like walking for pleasure.

 

The act of writing is like walking for pleasure.

(doing some editing too)

The act of writing is a pleasurable walk.

The act of writing is like walking for pleasure.

(so many options)