The Beauty of Not Knowing What This is About

In my writing group, the essential question posed is always: What is this about?

I just finished a long essay that started out being about our dishwasher being broken and how washing dishes by hand is such an oddly comforting this to do. But it ended up being about our family being mostly Jewish although dinnerware played a prominent role in the narrative.

This is one of the truly fun things about writing. It’s like a Sunday drive with no destination. Highway B intersects with NN and then crosses Moon Lake Road which you then take thinking it would be fun to see a lake only there’s no lake there, it was somebody’s clever name for a new subdivision. I mean who wouldn’t want to live on Moon Lake Road?

Where writers get stuck, in my opinion, is trying to figure out everything ahead of time. It is true that characters in a short story will quickly develop their own voices independent of the writer. It becomes wild and uncontrollable but perfect at the same time like four three-year-olds dyeing Easter eggs and eating them simultaneously.

An essay is the same. Oh, I know writers are supposed to work from an outline, know ahead of time what points need to be made, where examples fit in, and yes and yes and yes. To me, that’s headache producing and joyless. I just like to start with the dishwasher being broken and go from there. We’ll see what my writing group says tomorrow.

“You probably should have thought this through a bit more.”