Essay
The Age of the Essay is one of my favorite reads recently, even though it was written almost ten years ago. It describes what an essay should all be about.
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
Growing up we rarely had to write an essay. Our writing assignments were more infrequent than the writings my kids had to produce throughout high school and university. I can’t even recall the papers I had to write in university, beyond my thesis on the design and implementation of an ISDN Power Fail Unit for a Private Automatic Branch Exchange (PABX), to be used in emergency situations. Writing essays and papers is something quite popular in the US educational system and I applaud it.
I’ve been spending a lot more time writing in recent years in a professional setting. I am not in marketing, publishing, nor do I make a living writing. I use it to better my thinking and to be more a succinct and clear communicator. I ask questions and try to answer them.
The Meander (aka Menderes) is a river in Turkey. As you might expect, it winds all over the place. But it doesn’t do this out of frivolity. The path it has discovered is the most economical route to the sea. The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can’t have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course. This doesn’t always work. Sometimes, like a river, one runs up against a wall. Then I do the same thing the river does: backtrack. At one point in this essay I found that after following a certain thread I ran out of ideas. I had to go back seven paragraphs and start over in another direction. Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought– but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation. Real thought, like real conversation, is full of false starts. It would be exhausting to read. You need to cut and fill to emphasize the central thread, like an illustrator inking over a pencil drawing. But don’t change so much that you lose the spontaneity of the original.
Asking questions and meandering through potential answer appears natural to me. However, my struggle with my writing has been capturing a surprising ending, or at least a surprise of some magnitude.
Essays should aim for maximum surprise.
David Sedaris does this brilliantly. What starts as an ordinary page out of his journals, blossoms into an amazing, surprising, shocking or sometimes embarrassing ending.
The pressure of discovering something new, being contrarian, describing a funny insight, or just ending with a surprise, can be paralyzing. Not every river leads to the discovery of a hidden city, and just boringly flow into the ocean. The challenge is to keep being on the lookout what happens on the banks of the river or under water. I’ll keep essayer.