Trip Sheets, Goldfarb's lovely five-parter for Radio 3's The Essay, started out all romantic.
The essay starts with him relating an encounter with "one of the most promising young negro poets" who once told him: "I want to be a poet – not a negro poet".
Breaks are important, but the temptation of a break can start to creep in at particularly insidious moments, like just as your essay starts to get hard and you might be better served by getting over the difficult hump of that paragraph or that page.
I had an essay to start, a test coming up.
Often, we wait till the last minute to write an essay or start working on a project and cram to finish it all.
A helpful and informative way to expand an already-good draft of your essay and start beefing it up a bit is to provide more context for the topic and your perspective on it.
Or you might choose to build the intensity of your essay by starting with the smallest problem first.
Then the book's essay heart starts to take over, leading us into more abstract, loopy territory.
Taking a specific event as each essay's starting-point, he interweaves observation, autobiography and intensely personal reflections on what birds mean to him.
Like an over-ambitious student essay it starts with a quotation from Thucydides (in the original Greek): "Our constitution...is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority, but of the greatest number".
