The unqualified essayist

Notes on the art of essay writing

Mar 20, 2022

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Every essay starts from a childish twinkle of curiosity over the seemingly mundane, driven with a conviction that the topics one finds worthy of exploration will also be of general interest. I’ve had a few personal favourites over the past year on beauty, time, coffee, robots, war and madness. Each subject essentially different and yet all somehow indelibly linked to the tapestry of life.

But beyond this insatiable spirit of inquiry lies a dogged pursuit to articulate ones’ abstract thoughts into moderately comprehensible prose. These ideas, in my case, typically hit at the most inopportune of times, often sending me on a race to scribble them on the back of scrunched up supermarket receipts, candy wrappers or on the palm of my hand. If these scraps of disparate information were ever consolidated, they would portray the life of an itinerant writer traversing through life’s myriad of abstract experiences. Because you see, an essayists’ task is to lace these intangible escapades with a sense of comprehensibility.

Yet, there is no structure to this process, no well worn recipe or fall-back template. An essayist is, by virtue of the craft, unqualified. There is no rubric to abide by or accreditation to obtain. He is in fact freed from the rarefied milieu of academic convention. Armed with nothing but a self-proclaimed ‘writer’s instinct’, a literary compass if you like, facilitating the flow of ideas onto a page.

Despite the lack of form, there is a vital core to the genre of essay writing; an unmistakable receptivity to the ever-shifting process of minds and moods. An essayist attunes himself to the changing tides of opinion and emotion, harnessing the energy it imbues, digesting its relevance and implication, and finally proffering a viewpoint that is steadfastly personal and yet universally relatable.

An essayist luxuriates in the freedom to be self-absorbed and sometimes a tad egoistical because if one writes about life from his perspective then he assumes that it is also a perspective others want to hear. Of course, the counter argument is that one cannot write faithfully from any other vantage point but from the embers of his own mind.

There will always be a flavour of the ‘I’ in every narrative. Some of the most prolific essay writers in history, the Emersons, the E.B Whites and the Annie Dillards, have admitted to transmuting the self-centredness of writing into a literary aesthetic. As Scott Fitzgerald famously said: “You’ve got to sell your heart, your strongest reactions”.

But perhaps the most self-indulgent quality in essay writing lies in how one can playfully experiment with language, pushing the boundaries of linguistic permissibility without ever feeling compelled to uphold a particular style. An essayist isn’t too burdened with dressing up ideas with elaborate symbolisms or managing a supporting cast of evolving characters. As such, an essay is a shorthand route to capturing the depth and richness of a slice of reality, presented in all its untamed glory.

For an essayist, a topic has literary merit as long as it possesses sufficient relatability to his own interest and human condition. Each topic can be left unadorned - without the need for dramatic openings or earnest justifications. Regular readers don’t need convincing - they are there to experience the grittiness and wryness of it all, for better or worse, to soak it all in.

There is however a deep-rooted obligation for an essay to be veracious in its representation of reality because the primary role of an essayist is to paint reality through words, to rekindle, in the reader, the pleasure of the everyday, highlighting scenes unnoticed and lost which are brimming with meaning.

An essay with a commitment to truth, submerges its reader in its prose, taking him down through secret passageways and meandering alleys to the bottomless pit of the subconscious, to the underground of the human psyche where fear coexists with ambition, sadness with joy, doubts with certainty, nightmare with inner peace. Duality is after all the scaffolding of life.

Over time, an essayist solidifies a relationship with his readers; his everyday life battles and experiences overlap with their own, touching their heart because they are written with the simplicity of pure emotion, and yet without an ounce of mawkish sentimentalism.

Ultimately, an essayist is a mediator between reality and the inexplicable mysteries of bare existence. Each essay is a hair-raising tribute to the magic illusion that remains hidden underneath the mask of daily ordinariness.

Because if there is one thing this unqualified essayist knows, it is finding the remarkable within the melody of everyday life.

Before you go, please take a moment and read a guest essay I contributed to the profoundly soulful and mystically enchanting Surrender Now newsletter. My sincere thanks to Nicola for the wonderful opportunity.