Bold Essaying

"Go big or go home!"

That's something to shout from the bleachers, isn't it? It's energizing, that command to perform, to dare to achieve, to reach high, to make something happen. Yes! Go big or go home!

But doing so with one's writing -- well, that's harder, and especially if one has been conditioned through culture and belief to be kind, edifying, and orthodox. How do you "go big or go home" when you really don't wish to offend?

Worrying about offending, or worrying about whether what one says is polite, or politically correct, or orthodox -- these can be very deadening to good essays in the making. Such safeguarding can keep us from the thinking and feeling that good writing can bring about as we venture onto the page.

I'm trying to help my students feel enfranchised, empowered by writing. I want them to reach for an authentic voice, for authentic experience, for authentic adventuring by way of nouns and verbs and all the rest. Let us not be too timid about things, too careful (especially within a conservative faith and culture). Let us be boldly essaying.



Michel de Montaigne coined the name for this genre of personal reflective writing, and it comes from the French word essayer, meaning "to try" (not just attempt, but to test or to prove). The genre was born as an exploratory form, not as a means to confirm orthodoxies. Montaigne was not writing to make a point, but to find a point (or simply to find his bearings) within his reading, his living, and his musing. Essayists are discoverers by definition, risk takers, explorers.

So we need to practice real "essaying" -- real testing and proving of ideas and stances. We LDS Christians need to transcend the deep conservatism of the Mormon culture we know and hark back to the boldness of 19th century Latter-day Saints. I offer this quotation from a very bold seeker who "essayed" some pretty big stuff, Joseph Smith. His tone and topic are the essence of essaying:

Thy mind, O man! if thou wilt lead a soul unto salvation, must stretch as high as the utmost heavens, and search into and contemplate the darkest abyss, and the broad expanse of eternity—thou must commune with God.

What does that mean?! It means something big and rich, something deep and wide and perhaps a bit scary. Who dares to use their words to travel into the "darkest abyss"?

Go big or go home!

This means you can't know the destination as you set forth; you can't have the moral or the meaning all tidied up, ready and waiting, on the far shore. You don't know which shore you're aiming for, or which ocean, for that matter. But you have to trust the vessel, and in this case I mean the vehicle of verbalizing.

But we hold back. We worry about what someone might think who reads our journal or our heterodox musings. So we have to take that head on. We have to give ourselves permission to essay boldly. That darkest abyss is awaiting our arrival. That utmost heaven is waiting for us to give writing our utmost.

Go big or go home!

Okay, okay, but this isn't going to happen if we are too frightened to do so. We need reassurances. We need privacy -- at least until we find our feet, find our voice, find a stance that stands up. We need, in a word, some safety.

Here is what I'm asking my students to do so that they can be bold, but also safe:

Write about 1000 words privately (perhaps even by hand), knowing that you need not share any of those words, ever, with anyone. You're going to give yourself permission to explore thoughts and concepts that relate to your life but which would be awkward to say aloud or to share in any way.

You're going to "get real" about the stuff -- you know, the stuff that you haven't dared think or discuss but maybe need to. It could be personal things from your own history; it could be matters of family or of belief. It could be embarrassing, or sinful, or joyful, or sexual, or speculative, or fanciful, or obnoxious. It could be a rant, a fantasy, a doubt, a spiritual experience that is not fit, for whatever reason, for sharing. It could be something small, perhaps unremarkable to others, but intensely meaningful to you: a disappointment, a betrayal. Or it could be an addiction, or a vision; it could be a moment of intense rage or absolute peace.

Whatever the content, it should not be one of those things that is readily packaged into a sermon or a lesson, neatly tied up with trusty moral conclusions familiar to the home team. It needs to have weight and complexity. Maybe it is ambiguous, or blasphemous, or just plain hard to name or to square with your worldview. It doesn't have to be something wild or weird, but it could be. It just needs to come from that private place that you keep under guard because you don't know what to do with it.

This writing is not something that you are going to suddenly broadcast to others. You'll keep it private. But you'll face it, face it with words and time and reflective thought, on a level you have not done so before. You're going to drag it out and up into the light of your own, private writing where you can let writing give it shape, a way to deal with it. And you aren't going to back away from it. You're safe. You don't have to share one word of what you write. But you are going to write it. You are going to go into the abyss, the unknown, and make it known, just a bit, to yourself by way of sustained writing. A thousand words or even more.

Then what?

You're going to write about that writing -- without necessarily giving away the topic or the details. You will write a blog post of about 150-200 words where you reflect on that personal, private writing. Did it make you less afraid, more eager to wrangle that stuff through writing? Did it scare you, inspire you, bore you? What did you learn about the abyss, or about yourself? You don't have to give anything away. You can write in the abstract about your experience, but have that experience first, with private writing, and then write 150-200 words that can be semi-public on this class blog.

For my current students, I am going to offer, privately and separately, an example of both the private writing I'm encouraging, and the public reflecting upon that that I wish them to post on this blog.