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My White Whale

How I Wrote an Essay on a Book I Don't Like and Won a Prize for It

By Stephanie HoogstadPublished 2 years ago Updated 2 years ago 5 min read
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My White Whale
Photo by Spencer on Unsplash

My mom likes to say that she and I have the gift of BS. Give us the worst, most barren topic, and we’ll still be able to eke out a surprisingly substantial and meaningful response. It comes in handy when you’re stuck making idle chit-chat on a customer service line or forced talking with the great aunt you’ve avoided the entire family dinner. Of course, since I was an English major, this skill has been a lifesaver with essays. It even won me a place in my university’s annual anthology with an essay about a book I dislike. I even wrote it while suffering from a migraine attack (and if you don’t know just how much of a miracle that is, I envy you).

It started with a class on 19th-century American literature at UC Davis. I loved the subject, loved several of the books, and loved the professor (he was definitely in my top ten, at least). What I didn’t love was reading Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.

I don’t typically dislike Melville. I enjoyed “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” is, to me, more of a true masterpiece than the “classic” Melville is now known for. Moby-Dick, though, just never clicked for me. The writing is dense, the narrative pacing drags, and the whaling is broken down into excruciating detail. (I get the need for accuracy, detail, and world building even in realistic fiction, but Melville takes it to an extreme.) Nowadays, I also avoid the book because it reminds me that my mother discovered that we are related to people on the Essex, the whaling ship that helped to inspire Moby-Dick. That, however, is a story for a different time—and for strong stomachs.

So, when the prompts for the final essay came out, they had to favor Melville’s whale of a tale. The professor loved the book, after all; it was just a karmic bonus that I didn’t. There were a few other options, but around ten years and endless freelance work have erased the specifics from my mind. For whatever reason, I settled on a Moby-Dick prompt and reluctantly moved forward.

This is when the gift of BS got to work. Based on the chosen prompt, I found a part of the book—a very specific scene and a very specific conversation within that scene, in fact—that actually caught my interest. (Oddly, I only narrowed in on it because Captain Ahab references the Ancient Romans, and I’m a sucker for those classics in most forms.) From there, I found a peer-reviewed article, as required by the prompt, and made my connections. How exactly I make these connections and draw out the arguments I use for essays, I wish I knew. It’s something that happens with barely any conscious effort on my part (most of the time), and I usually take it as another aspect of the gift of BS.

Unfortunately, the gift of BS has a mortal enemy: the migraine attack. What a migraine attack is, how horrible one is, and how long I’ve been getting them are subjects for another day. Suffice to say, they are NOT just really bad headaches. I do get REALLY bad headaches with my attacks, by which I mean a throbbing pain in my head and eyes that makes me almost completely unable to see or even sit up, and I am in tears and long for death if I don’t treat it soon enough. That’s without mentioning the vomiting and nausea. Still, that’s only a fraction of what a migraine attack is and more than enough to debilitate the average essayist.

The final day before the essay was due, I had the most horrific migraine attack imaginable. I couldn’t keep food down, let alone the Imitrex to treat the migraine. In between typing spurts, I had to lie down in my bed and sleep or pray that I wouldn’t throw up—or just throw up. Even by the time the essay was finished, the migraine still pinned me to the bed, and I couldn’t remember a single word I had typed.

I agonized over that essay, both because I had completed it in the midst of a blinding migraine and because I’m one of the most self-deprecating, anxiety-ridden, perfectionist workaholics you’ll ever meet. In the end, my nerves were for naught. My professor adored the essay. I aced the class.

On a whim—the same little nagging pull you get when you suddenly decide to take a different route to work only to later learn there was a fatal accident on your normal path—I submitted that same essay to the UC Davis Prized Writing Anthology, which I had just learned about in a departmental e-mail. Soon after, I won a place in the anthology and a small cash prize.

How? To this day, I still only remember arguing that Captain Ahab’s hatred of nature acts as an attribute of his god complex. Well, the gift of BS in its essay-writing form involves writing down every single thought you have regarding that subject before you get to the actual writing so that you don’t forget even the most abstract thought that you might be able to stretch out over a couple pages. With this essay, that meant I had written out a detailed outline of my essay including book quotes, arguments, sub-arguments, close-reading, and a rough introduction and conclusion in between classes and even when I got bored during lectures. When that migraine came, the BS flowed out of its own accord. I was merely a typist on autopilot, free to curl up into the fetal position and lose the contents of my stomach as my body demanded.

So, was this miracle truly the gift of BS, a natural talent for essay-writing and close-reading, or obsessive-compulsive planning when it comes to my writing? My guess would be all three. They tend to work in tandem, sometimes to my benefit and sometimes for my downfall. The only thing I can do is use them to my advantage, particularly the gift of BS. All the while, my personal white whale haunts me. In TV shows, movies, and literature, we plop the great Moby-Dick in anywhere we can, just because we can, to my embarrassment and amusement. My mom gets great joy out of pointing out whenever the white whale pops up, and I don’t really blame her. It’s funny and more than a bit karmic. Forever, now, Moby-Dick will follow me, a reminder of how I BS’ed my way into a university anthology and never got called out for it.

To read my essay on Moby-Dick, click here. For more information on migraines, visit the American Migraine Foundation's website or, for a more personal view, check out this post I wrote on my blog.

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About the Creator

Stephanie Hoogstad

With a BA in English and MSc in Creative Writing, writing is my life. I have edited and ghost written for years with some published stories and poems of my own.

Learn more about me: thewritersscrapbin.com

Support my writing: Patreon

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