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that neither thing was exactly true. I didn’t care. “This is not just something I got a degree in. And the first thing to know is that we’re all in writing hell. All of us.”
    What I was about to tell them—how writing was so tied to our weaknesses and lunacies and psychoses—was not covered in our English 101 textbook. I’d been thinking about writing for twenty years, and it all burst out of me in a torrent.
    â€œYou sit in front of the blank screen and feel like an idiot,” I said, “unable to form a single cogent thought. I sit there and I think to myself: what business have I writing anything, when I can barely remember how to burp? Breathing itself seems a cognitive struggle. At least the computer cursors don’t blink at you anymore. They used to, rhythmically, like the impatient tapping of a foot. Oh, the worry! The anxiety! I’ve been fighting it for years. I remember working on a typewriter, with the bond paper in the roller and my feeling, as I sat there, of rising panic. I’ve got to get something typed or that paper will be hopelessly curled! And then where would we be?”
    I told them: the writer must just start, and write terribly until he can, with any luck, get into a groove. This is not how other endeavors work. The barber would go out of business if the first few haircuts of the day were complete butcheries. The surgeon does not leap into the operation knowing how badly it will all go at first.
    Writing is difficult for so many reasons, I said.
    It doesn’t fit in with our contemporary ethos, in which everything is neat, cleaned, pressed, ordered, and lightly perfumed, with ample backup systems in place. Ours is an age in thrall to perfection. We demand every contingency prepared for, routes planned to the last turn in MapQuest, high definition and great nutrition, stadium seating and mouth-covered sneezes and enormous umbrellas and frequent hand washing, spotless sidewalks, 20/10 vision, a New York City without crime; we demand sobriety, prudence, and good manners. Writing, no matter how disciplined the writer or detailed the outline, is a messy business. No matter how hard the writer works, the writing is never quite complete. The writer is like a kidnap victim: blindfolded, in a sack, in a car trunk, struggling for a glimpse of the light of cogency. Even the most careful and orderly-of-mind writer must fight battles on multiple fronts simultaneously, rendering repairs on the introduction that make paragraph seven entirely redundant, introducing the lightning-brilliant never-before-uttered concept in paragraph two that makes paragraphs three, four, and five seem vaguely sheepish, as though they are pointedly not mentioning this stunningly brilliant idea.
    Writing is difficult because, at first blush, most of us have little to say. Even when we think we have an essay in us, even when our passions are inflamed, attempting to order and flesh out our thoughts just makes the reality apparent. The whole thing starts to deflate. Under no circumstances, though, should the writer stop writing at that point, for what we have to say emerges from the craft of writing—our pieces are in some ways a by-product of the endeavor, the way a toned body emerges from exercise, or a fluted and tapering vase emerges from fingers pressing on a spinning mass of clay.
    We will not be writing “the college essay,” I told them, but rather “the college composition. An essay indicates something tried, something essayed. A composition is built, crafted, worked on, composed. It must be level and plumb, like a bookcase or a coffee table, planed and sanded, all of its nail holes puttied. The composition is not merely an end but a thing.”
    And now here’s a contradiction, I told them—the first of many. Writing is difficult because of its many contradictions. The full, rounded, resonant meaning of prose emerges as it is worked over, but some of those