Essays

[nancylebov]

Here's Paul Graham on essays.

After a history of how non-fiction prose has come to be taught--it comes partly from the renaisssance work of assimilating classical culture and partly from legal argument, he gives a description of essays--a sort of writing which begins with a question rather than a premise and which describes the discursive work of getting an answer.

(IIRC, I was never given any systematic explanation, good or bad, of how to write an essay, but I do remember having to write about who was the tragic hero of _Julius Caesar_ and wondering why anybody would care.)

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.

So, what's interesting?

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

This at least starts to address one of the questions I've been chewing on for a while--how to be interesting. I'm at least decent at it, but the web and the net are plagued by people who are want attention but don't know any pleasant way of getting it. Telling them about surpise might help and is kinder than asking them to come back when they can pass a Turing test.

Comments

[nellorat.livejournal.com]

I thought the part about being surprising, and the value of that, was the best part of the essay. I also liked, and agree with, the linking of that to the importance of noticing--observing details, trends, and so on. I often describe C. S. Lewis's "The Shoddy Lands" to writing classes: "but my point is not that women think that way, but that such an individual would probably not be a very interesting writer on most topics."

What Graham doesn't acknowledge, I think, is that there are two models of the essay. Montaigne's (and Francis Bacon's) is one, more open-ended and often aphoristic. In the early 19th century, that was replaced by the more formal essay as we know it today, written by R. W. Emerson in the USA, Charles Lamb in England, etc.

He also seems behind the times on education--maybe talking about his own education, and not current education? For one thing, over the past 25 years or more, the trend in composition classes has been away from just essays on literature and towards essays on a wider range of topics. Even when I taught freshman comp in the late 70s and early 80s, the students did only one literary paper, based on a novel the whole class read in a Riverside critical edition. (I ususally did Lewis Carroll's Alice books.) Other than that, students did read and discuss writing (nonfiction), but they usually wrote on the same general topic instead of about the writing. For instance, they read essays for and against legalization of drugs and for and against gun control, and then they wrote a research paper arguing that something legal should be illegal, or the reverse. (My favorite was that fireworks would be less dangerous if legal in all states.) I think this approach is the most common one now.

Also, process writing--which seems to be the dominant form of writing teaching now--addresses his issues about finding your way, while still allowing for a formal finished essay. I have to say that for many writers, the meandering is not terribly interesting, and sometimes is outright confusing, even if it is necessary to get to interesting places. So, the most common approach now says, write a meandering rough draft and then (using his metaphor) do the land-moving so that in the final version you can cut out some oxbows and switchbacks and still get to the true and valuable places.

Graham may just be better than most writers at meandering interestingly, but doesn't know or acknowledge that.

Still, many thanks for the link. I suppose one effect of choosing the meandering style of essay (which I think of as the 17th-century style) is to be more open to criticism, but by that token more thought-provoking. A 19th-century style essay, with all the rough edges polished and loose ends tied in or cut off, may be more apt to provoke agreeement and admiration.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you liked it. Paul Graham tends to do very nice analysis of how people do things skillfully.

Do you know of any good books on how to structure essays? Writing in an LJ has made me realize that I don't have the foggiest idea of making pieces build up to anything. I just charge forward and edit for efficiency and good sense.

Probably more of a pre-college thing, but I've heard of assignments to write about highly personal material. I have some serious doubts--there are topics which I *really* wouldn't have wanted to hand in to a teacher.

I may take another crack at reading _The Sword of Constantine_ from the process writing angle. When I tried it before, I wanted to yell at the author, "Why don't you figure out what you think and then tell me?" Or is that bad process writing?