Post: #1

This is the best essay I have ever read.

If you are interested in becoming a better writer - or want a brand new paradigm for understanding the world, you have to check this out.

It is quite lengthy. It will take about 15 minutes to read. But it is well worth it.

Graham discusses the historical roots of essays, and why our entire understanding of their purpose is completely wrong. The essay is constantly surprising. So - it is worth reading in full as opposed to just sampling the excerpt I give further down.

Later - he goes on to teach how you can become a better essay writer. And in doing so he provides advice which is both useful and truly inspiring.

He really captures the mindset that people should have when writing an essay. And - beyond that - when living life in general.

This central passage lies at the heart of his advice.

Quote:Questions aren't enough. An essay has to come up with answers. They don't always, of course. Sometimes you start with a promising question and get nowhere. But those you don't publish. Those are like experiments that get inconclusive results. An essay you publish ought to tell the reader something he didn't already know.

But what you tell him doesn't matter, so long as it's interesting. I'm sometimes accused of meandering. In defend-a-position writing that would be a flaw. There you're not concerned with truth. You already know where you're going, and you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. But that's not what you're trying to do in an essay. An essay is supposed to be a search for truth. It would be suspicious if it didn't meander.

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.

Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It's not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don't find it. I'd much rather read an essay that went off in an unexpected but interesting direction than one that plodded dutifully along a prescribed course.

Quote:So what's interesting? For me, interesting means surprise.

Quote: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.

Recently I have being trying to discover a mindset which will help me understand what the goal of good writing should be.

And this essay has finally unlocked that door for me.

The essay below is valuable to writers looking to improve their work. And to anyone else looking to understand things they have previously not even noticed. It is a very powerful mindset to adopt.

http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html

Plato

PS Thanks to Beyond Borders for mentioning this essay to me.

Post: #2

Reminds me of this one Nietzsche quote:

44. The Well-Grounded One:
A scholar I? I’ve no such skill! –
I’m merely grave – just heavy set!
I fall and fall and fall until
I to the bottom get.

It's about meandering until you find truth.