I have now created seven individual Google Docs titled “expectations” and written nothing. This is number eight.
In a brilliant 1976 essay unoriginally—though not unintentionally—titled Why I Write, the late Joan Didion described writing as the process of pulling ideas out of one’s head kicking and screaming, not knowing what they are before they hit the page. As she put it…
“The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture.”
When I was a freshman at Tufts, my spectacular English 101 professor assigned Didion’s highly personal essay, alongside George Orwell’s original Why I Write, to illustrate how the two saw the same theme dramatically differently.