I have yet to really get something written for my final “Eye” essay, but I do have plenty of notes and thoughts on my topic (its putting these thoughts and notes into actual sentences on the page that’s slowing me down).

I’m writing an essay about writing an essay, and my main goal is to make it not like an essay. It’s Creative NonFiction after all. So I found a few quotes that I was originally (and still might) going to use and made some bullets about what I’m going to include:

-A small intro to the piece

-Knowing what to write

-The writing process

-Editing

I even thought of a few ways to relate to this topic (with the possibility of including the writing process of this essay which inspired the whole topic). Then, while I was thinking about writing a small part about different types of professors (the types that assign a topic for an essay and those that let you have free reign) an idea came to me. Why not make this sort of like a survival guide?

Title and opening sentence:

The College Student Survival Guide

Tip #25: Essay Writing

Tip #25 in our college student survival guide is on essay writing, one of the most dreaded topics for even the best writers.

The “tip” part came as a sort of after thought, and the number is just a random number. I figured there are  a lot of survival tips needed to survive college and some students may find essay writing farther down on their list (hence the high number).

The idea about the different professors was transformed into looking at it as if the student was looking at an exotic animal: a creature that doesn’t understand that they have at least 4 other classes to do homework for as well as write their 10 page paper.

While the piece will focus on how to write an essay, I want to do it in a way that’s a mixture of funny and serious (and of course not preachy). I already have discovered that there are a lot of students who do not know how to write a proper essay, and I don’t want to make this like I’m telling them what to do. I want it to be more light hearted, if that makes any sense, and set it on a level that all college students will understand and appreciate.

I think something that will help me write this is if I look at both the Werewolf Survival Guide and the Zombie Survival Guide because, although they are different types of survival guides, they are written the way I would like to write this creative nonfiction piece. As if it were a chapter from a book.

Over and out.