Writing Essays

I hate writing essays.

There, I said it. I hate writing essays. Three reasons:

1. Too short. I've never enjoyed writing anything short. Maybe this is something I should work on, but I always want to know how I'm supposed to develop anything within a couple of pages. {Other people do it. I stand in awe.} My brain thinks in novels. It thinks in tens of thousands of words. I'm long-winded {ask anyone I email}, and writing short is way harder for me than writing long.
2. Too irrelevant. Why would I write an essay on something, anything, when I could be writing a novel? Novels are much more interesting. Essays are...pointless. And English teachers expect you to write them, and write them well, and all the while, I'm wondering why I'm pouring this much energy into a paper I don't even care about. This frustrated me all through high school. You would have assumed that I liked English class, and while I didn't hate it, it drove me crazy because of the writing spent on worthless {I thought} things like character comparison and contrast. {I'm sure there is literary worth in the comparison/contrast. Maybe it subconsciously made me a better writer. Maybe I will draw on it someday. I'm not going to diss it, because it must be worth something in the writing world if my English teacher adored it so, but I still haven't found out the reason.}
3. Too annoying. A lot of the essays you will write are about how awesome you are. Seriously. Scholarship essays, statement of purpose essays. Tell us why we should give money to you. Tell us why we should accept you. In other words, tell us why you are so awesome. This is not how I roll. I do not write about how awesome I am. It feels weird. Plus, there's an element of sucking up there. Which just feels awkward.

I feel like there's something wrong with me. I'm a writer, but I hate writing essays. In fact, I didn't enjoy much of my Reading (in elementary school) and English (in high school) classes. I should have. I was good at it. But I wasn't much for it. Essay writing is writing energy spent on essays. And I could just never see the point writing an essay. I do like to read them. But writing them is a whole 'nother story. Or isn't a story, which is kind of the point.