Why I Struggled to Write

When I was younger, I struggled to write essays. And it wasn’t just that I struggled to put sentences together or use proper grammar — I just couldn’t pump enough content out. I remember writing a comparison essay in sixth grade about Lay’s versus Doritos, and I struggled to come up with anything to talk about. Granted, I also wrote the essay in about 10 minutes, because I realized I forgot to do it the night before, so I wrote it as my teacher was walking around and collecting essays. But still, me struggling to come up with any points about how Lay’s and Doritos were different was quite discouraging to me. I thought to myself: was I just stupid? Do I just not know enough to have ideas pop into my head?

But besides that one essay, every piece of writing to me was just so daunting, the white page staring me down and just pushing me to write…but I didn’t know what to write. Whether it was just a simple book report where I just had to regurgitate the synopsis SparkNotes style, or a more serious essay employing some sort of literary analysis on Shakespeare. Why was that?

I will try to diagnose this now. I feel like a lot of the reason I couldn’t write anything was because I didn’t care about the topic enough, so there wasn’t any motivation to even think about the topic. I liken this to arguing with someone — when you are passionate in an argument, you can go on and on for hours, talking about the same topic, from different, or the same angle, but always talk. While this isn’t necessarily good content that comes out of arguing, that’s already one baseline that you pass by just having enough content. After you have a bunch of text on your screen, then you can edit, reorganize, or formulate more complicated arguments by revising and reorganizing.

I also had this issue with college essays, and I attribute the failure to just apathy. I didn’t care about college essays that much — I saw them as a burden and sort of a long answer box that I had to fill out as part of a longer form, and although I knew they were important, I didn’t really care. Also — I just didn’t have that much content to write about. I think puberty is also a time when you are apathetic about a lot of things. You’re physically maturing, you start thinking about things like sex all the time, and you become super self-conscious and want to be the best you…whatever that means. While you can certainly find things you like to do in life, it’s often hard to say you truly love something or have passion for it, because you just haven’t matured yet. Not necessarily a solution, but I think a way to have your kid have a better college essay writing experience is to give them more experiences to write about. If your kid does math competitions, try to get them to go on as many trips as they can, but also support them so they do wel. It doesn’t make any sense to send them to a bunch of competitions but have them get destroyed all the time. If they do better at the activity they are participating in and do it a lot, they are bound to have experiences to write about, whether it’s a struggle, success, conflict, etc. There will be plenty of content to write about, and having such a specialization in an activity is bound to make the reader interested, regardless of whether the event itself was good.

What this means overall for writing is that producing content is just having the experience, and the passion and motivation to go on and on about it. Without either, you will get stuck writing, and the process of forcing out a paper will be extremely painful and ultimately unsuccessful. Care about the things you do more, and you will have more to write about.

Besides the world of college essays, something that you can do in general to give yourself more passion about things is to constantly be curious, and try to formally read about things that you come across. For example, if someone ever challenges an idea that you have, you should try to defend it, and if you are defeated, you should read up on it so you don’t lose the next argument. For example, instead of just seeing a TikTok about how not to cook eggs and take it for word, you should think about whether or not it’s cap, research about it online, and then use that knowledge for the next time the topic shows up. Knowledge exploration can also be done well through reading various topics more “formally,” which I define to be picking up books, or reading more beefy sources like Wikipedia, which are areas where you can find a comprehensive discussion about a topic, rather than a short video clip with dubious sources of information.

Stay curious and hungry about information, and you should have more ideas flow to you naturally, which should make the writing process flow more smoothly.