Essay Writing, my trials and tribulations

My first essay in my english class was slightly dificult to write. The topic was the best to me for that particular essay, it's just I couldn't put enough information into the paper. I couldn't find reliable facts to back up my thoughts and opinions. This was hard to me because I am a factual person by nature and I feel that I need to justify my thoughts by having supporting facts. I believe not having these limited my writing so it is not the best I have written by any means.

When I read the essays that others had written I really didnt get anything out of them. This is becasue the essays that I read weren't really essays at all, but just paragraphs. It was the difference between a Roald Dahl book and a Victor Hugo novel. Here I am trying to write an essay on a topic with complete formulation of thoughts and anecdotes, when I read these paragraphs that are a bunch of adjectives describing a very simple topic. I'm not saying these weren't really good descriptions, I'm just saying they didn't correlate to my writing at all.