Two and a Half Pages
Prefer to listen?
I declared myself an English Major at age 26 and assumed I was brilliant. As I scanned the graded paper, there were no markings. Eventually I turned to the partially full third page where I found a note from the instructor,
“I’m not sure you can even spell MLA — C-”
I was determined, or maybe just stubborn, so I spent the next two weeks learning MLA formatting and basic essay writing structures. I wondered what would happen, when the second essay came back with only one brutal comment,
“I don’t know how you got this far in college without knowing how to use a comma — C+”
Neither comment felt encouraging, and both of them were, unfortunately, deserved. Once I recovered, I began spending my time between classes in the writing center and surrounded myself with people who already excelled at these things. I worked hard. I learned the rules. I revised drafts and the grades improved. The steps were brutal and not always in the best order, but I finally earned an A- from this professor on the final paper of the semester. He went as far as to tell me,
“This is a solid example of a two-and-a-half-page essay.”
Then came a five-page assignment.
The next semester in the second week I was assigned to write a five-page essay. No one else seemed intimidated but it seemed almost impossible. I panicked, and scheduled a time to meet with the professor who I learned from the first semester. I sat in his office, afraid of what he would say but knowing he would be straightforward with me, and asked him how to write a five-page essay. He looked at me and, in a monotone, almost disinterested voice he said,
“I know you know how to write a two-and-a-half-page essay now. Maybe you should just try and do it twice on the same subject. Broaden what you are talking about or consider another point of view. Just write two essays that are each two and a half pages on the same subject.”
That was it, our meeting was over in 5 minutes, and he ushered me out of his office. I thought I would get some kind of a strategy guide or something. Just a simple reframing, and somehow the assignment changed shape in front of me. Five pages stopped being one impossible thing. It became two manageable things. For the first time, I could actually see a path, it just had two steps now instead of one.
Over the years, the same pattern repeated. The five-page paper became a ten-page paper. The ten-page paper became twenty. Eventually I completed a master’s thesis of roughly sixty-five pages, and looking back, it’s hard not to laugh. That thesis wasn’t really sixty-five pages. It was still two and a half pages, repeated, organized, expanded, built section by section. The scale changed. The process never did.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that my professor had taught me something much larger than how to write for college English classes. He taught me how to approach any goal large enough to feel intimidating. To me, most meaningful things in my life have arrived looking like five-page papers, or sixty-five-page theses, or The Writing House, books, careers, and a move across the ocean. We look at the finished picture and get overwhelmed by its size. The mistake isn’t wanting the whole thing. The mistake is believing you must understand the whole thing before you are allowed to begin.
Years later, I’d give this a name: “The Next Right Step”. It wasn’t about finding the last step, nor about the perfect one. It certainly wasn’t about the entire staircase; it was just about the next visible one that I felt was right.
The funny thing is that I was practicing the method long before I ever gave it a name. My professor saw it before I did. I am grateful he never gave me a strategy guide for writing five-page essays. Somehow, he gave me a process and gave me permission to stop looking at the whole assignment and start looking at the next real piece of it.
I can write sixty-five pages now. Not because I learned how to write sixty-five pages. Because I learned how to write two and a half. Then another two and a half. Then another.
Most of what matters in my life has turned out to work the same way.
Love Emily