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Photo by russn_fckr on UnsplashToday’s guest post is by author Amy L. Bernstein. Join us on Wednesday, October 7, for the online class Find Your Voice as an Essayist.
The 16th-century writer Michel de Montaigne is credited with “inventing” the modern essay form. Whether that’s true or not, Montaigne did a great job defining the essence of what an essay was then—and still is today.
“If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions,” he wrote.
That quip says it all: The purpose of an essay is to explore an idea, test a thesis, and share observations. An essay presents a conclusion only after treating the reader to an engaging narrative analysis.
These days, with the rise of Substack, Medium, LinkedIn, and other digital publishing platforms that offer writers total control without any gatekeeping, every writer may be tempted to fancy herself an essayist.
But just because it’s easy to publish in the essay form—any narrative prose article longer than, say, 600 words—doesn’t mean you’ve mastered the format, hooked your reader, or made a compelling or persuasive argument.
Writing a strong essay is no easier than writing strong fiction. The essay is like any other literary genre: There are rules and guidelines worth following and many styles to choose from, which dictate different points of view and structures.
After all, a science fiction novel is not built the same way as a cozy mystery. Both tell stories—but differently. Similarly, a humor essay is not built exactly like a revisionist history essay or a confessional first-person essay.
If you intend to get serious about writing powerful essays, you should familiarize yourself with three structural components that you’ll tie together to make a cohesive whole:
- Form
- Voice
- Outcome
Let’s review each of these to help you figure out the kind of essay that’s the best match for your writing style and the subjects you want to write about.
Form follows function
You have an idea for an essay but you aren’t sure how to characterize or “containerize” it. It’s helpful to pick a bucket, as follows:
- Opinion: What I believe (and why).
- Memoir: What I wish to share about a key moment of my life.
- Entertainment: I find x funny, silly, absurd, ironic.
- Reportage: These events actually happened and here’s what they mean.
The bucket you choose helps to clarify how you will structure the essay. That is, your headline, opening line, thesis, anecdotes, examples, and conclusion will all reflect the bucket.
Consider, for example, a classic humor essay by Dave Barry Traffic Woes Drive Us Crazy. Putting the word “crazy” in the title hints at a piece that’s going to reflect on extremes, one way or another. The use of exaggeration is a classic tool of humor. If this were a reportage or opinion essay, the title might be “Traffic Woes Drive Radical Policy Proposals at City Hall.” That piece promises facts accompanied by a sober opinion.
Barry’s opening line clues us in immediately that we’re not meant to take this essay seriously:
Our traffic problems are getting worse, according to a recent study by the Institute of Discovering Things That Make You Go “Duh.”
Like most good humor pieces, this one builds to an absurd suggestion for fixing the traffic problem: Steal Washington DC’s subway by unscrewing pieces of the subway and transporting them to Barry’s home state, Florida.
And much laughter ensues.
The reader readily relates to the essay’s thesis, namely, that traffic is terrible. But there’s not a serious moment in the piece itself; all of the observations are intentionally over-the-top.
This is a classic example of form following function: The essay offers readers a moment of cathartic release (Oy! Traffic!) by way of a series of silly but relatable moments.
Voicing an essay
As in fiction and other forms of narrative nonfiction, the author’s voice is vital to “selling” an essay’s central thesis and winning the reader’s trust. Once you’ve selected a bucket for your essay, you’re well on the way to figuring out how to voice the piece. For Dave Barry, being silly (often in a pointed way) comes naturally.
But for the author of I Thought I Was In Love With My Roommate. I Wanted To Be Her, serious personal confession is the way to go. This writer has chosen the memoir bucket.
The essay opens with strong emotion, immediately signaling that this writer intends to bare her soul:
When your face appeared on my laptop screen, I blinked. My mouth went dry. A LinkedIn notification showed that you visited my profile, even though we hadn’t spoken in more than twenty years.
You can already feel the writer’s heart racing. You wouldn’t expect this piece to veer off into humor or into fact-laden reportage. Thankfully, it doesn’t. The writer uses recreated dialogue and brief but sharply drawn scenes to share a complex, unrequited love story, recounted years later.
The voice in this piece is filled with heightened emotion and unresolved feelings. That choice creates empathy with the reader—just as the writer intended. A less raw, more withholding voice would not have worked nearly as well because that choice would put distance between reader and writer.
The outcome as payoff
Along with figuring out the right container and voice for your essay, you also must decide what you want to reader to take away from the piece. Your essay needs to answer the “So what?” question that often plagues fiction and memoir: “You’ve told me x, but why should I care?”
You need not hit the reader over the head with an enumerated call to action, unless that’s your intention. Nor must you awkwardly spell out your conclusion, as in: “My purpose in sharing all this is so that…” or “I hope you learn from this…” or other overly obvious phrases.
Nevertheless, your essay must have a larger point. Your thesis, observations, and anecdotes need to build to a conclusion. Otherwise, the piece risks reading like a loose collection of ideas that don’t amount to anything substantial.
In the reportage essay Don’t Celebrate Lindsay Clancy, the author lays out the facts of this horrific story (a mother who killed her children) and analyzes how the story itself was contextualized by the media and various critics. And then, near the very end, the author puts the entire essay into very pointed perspective with this observation:
Raising awareness around postpartum mental health is all well and good, and genderslop discourse keeps some people busy, but none of that has much to do with the actual lives that were broken on one horrible day three years ago. There is something howling and bleak out there, beyond the edge of our comprehension. Lindsay Clancy didn’t so much fall through the cracks of a broken system as she was swallowed up by an abyss.
Without this vital paragraph, the entire essay would be little more than a recounting of the facts with a dash of media criticism. What makes this essay a good essay is the writer’s ability to interpret a difficult, topical story in a way that helps readers also make sense of it.
Parting thoughts
As you explore the essay form to figure out what works for you, pay close attention to the ideas that get your juices flowing. Chances are, those are the ones you’ll want to write about, whether they’re ripped from headlines or reflect an obsession you’ve had since you were sixteen.
Take time to read and analyze classic essays, such as Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” or Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’”. Study how these essays are put together, section by section; how they achieve a conclusion that feels inevitable; and how they embed hooks to get you interested and keep you going.
The publishing world is changing rapidly, but I’m confident that the essay is here to stay. As Montaigne wrote centuries ago, “I do not speak the minds of others except to speak my own mind better.” That strikes me as a literary goal that will never go out of fashion.
Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, October 7, for the online class Find Your Voice as an Essayist.
