The Magical Art of Essay Writing

Why are we so obsessed with Marie Kondo?

She has a bestselling book which couples routinely buy for each other, a television show,  merchandise, and her name has even become a verb. have you Kondoed your home? I’ve  also mentioned her in several different posts in this blog. Her ideas, whether you like them or not, are very pervasive.  She wants us to get rid of things we don’t need or don’t use– or, at least, she did want that when she first put out her book, but I think she’s softened up since she had kids. In any case, I think my takeaway from her messaging is:  Don’t keep things that drag you down.

I thought about her again last night while helping my daughter with an essay. I love essays. They hit a sweet spot in my brain. I love any writing, even  technical wiring and legalese, but essays are my jam. Writing brings me peace. In writing, I become the organized, clear, and neat person that I keep insisting to myself that I really am. One of the reasons for  the persistence of this delusion is that I am a skilled editor.   Any good writer knows the importance of taking a good, hard look at your work and trimming back wherever necessary, even when it means cropping out the perfectly crafted sentence, or a really good idea that just doesn’t belong.  I make it easier on myself by pasting any text that is hard to let go of to the bottom of the document I’m working on. That way, I will still have it handy when the perfect place for it pops up, or I can steal words or imagery from it to insert into other parts of the work.  If I get to the point when I’m ready to hit ‘send,’ ‘submit,’ or ‘publish’ and there are still scraps on the cutting room floor, then I know I’ve wrung all I can out of them. I thank them, as per Ms. Kondo’s instructions, and let them flutter off into the great big sanctuary in the ether for ideas that didn’t find a home and words that never landed where they should.  Or so I tell myself.

In reality, I both hoard and minimize (or ‘tidy up’, in Kondospeak). If there are some scraps that I just can’t let go of, I use the magic of word processing to save a clean version of the document, sans discards, but I retain a version with the deletions in case I ever want to come back to it which, let’s be honest, happens rarely, if ever. And so, I condemn my discards to a hopeful but  ghostly life on my hard drive.

I function in pretty much the same way when it comes to my home or my timetable. I am able to get rid of things and also say no to duties, but I find smaller, hidden places to tuck them in, should I ever want or need them.   The real challenge, and a topic for another post, is knowing that I still have them when the need for them comes up, and knowing from where and how to retrieve them.  This is what has led to the pile of old laptops in my office. I don’t want to lose whatever is on them, but I also don’t know the darn passwords for them.  (I blame this on the pandemic when the kids got hold of our old devices for online learning and modified them for their own use.)

So am I the organized guru that I see in myself when I write? Yes. But am I also the slob with a huge ‘giveaway’ bag in her basement which she will probably never give away? Also yes. Sigh.

I Lied

Last post, I went on and on about whether or not I should keep this expensive planner that I’d bought. By the end of that post, I concluded that I should just keep the darn thing and start using it. Well, dear reader, while you weren’t looking, I changed my mind, put the expensive planner in a reused Amazon bubble envelope to protect it, put that in my ‘things to return’ bag, and returned it over the weekend.  

Instead, I decided to use this free, printable planner that I found online. I know, there are several disadvantages to something that is not already in book form, but I won’t go into that here.  I will, however, provide you with the link to the planner I am *planning* on using, and explain why. It’s not necessarily the price that made me  do it.  And the disadvantage of this new planner is that it doesn’t have a daily or weekly reflection built in, so you if you want to assess your progress, you need to build that in yourself.  However, I like that this one…. you know what?  I don’t remember anymore.  Sorry, dear reader. I already returned the old one and I can’t refer back to it to see how I made the decision.

Once I printed off all the different pages of this planner– it has yearly, quarterly, monthly, and daily sections– I started reformatting it to so that I can try and squeeze it in to more portable proportions, in case I want to take it with me.  I also made multiples of some of the pages so that I can begin filling in, for example, the next couple of months at the same time. 

Oh yes, this is one of the advantages of the new planner. I like that I can move pages around so that I can compare and copy.  For example, as I mentioned above, I want to work on laying out events on a monthly basis as opposed to a weekly basis, because that enables me to schedule a certain number of days for a task or a project more realistically. Trying to commit to doing something on the same day every week is, as I am realizing after over a decade of trying, is not a realistic proposal because there are all sorts of interruptions such as school holidays, family events, celebrations, ceremonies, etc which float around on a calendar without regard for what I expect will happen on Tuesdays. Because this planner has a space on each page for you to copy out and remind you of your larger goals, it’s also handy to be able to quickly access the long-term pages that you fill out less frequently such as the annual or quarterly pages.

That’s the end of this post, however I will leave you a little teaser: The new, printable planner almost brought me to tears.  More on that soon. 

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