Tag: essay writing

To Think More Clearly

Let’s spend the week experimenting with how you write the essay that follows that post. Look to Google Classroom for the formal assignment, and then start with this quotation from Piet Hein:

Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.

That echoes Paul Graham, whose “Age of the Essay” tells us what writing should do (emphasis mine):

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.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.

And we’ll throw in Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” too, which adds another perspective:

It took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Right now, you have a subject for the essay you are writing. You have potential prompts and possible directions to take. You may have jumped into putting words on the page, and you may have only just finished reading that preparatory post¹; regardless, you are at the relative start of the writing process.

Now you need a clear and precise approach to the subject at hand. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf, in Moments of Being, compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together”:

I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.

Come up with your approach. What question will drive your process? What is your perspective as you begin? What’s interesting or inventive or curious about your thinking as you start writing? What are you trying to learn?

Ask me questions and share ideas below.

1. If you fall into the camp that hasn’t done the prep work, keep that to yourself until you’ve caught up, and recognize the danger of making poor choices over and over again: Eventually, you are what you do. ↩