Accessible Essays

After that deep dive into philosophy on the last post, we need to come back up for air. So, I thought I would do that by talking about a few writers who write extremely accessible essays. In simple terms, this means easy to read and understand. However, after being an academic for over two decades, I find it difficult to use language that normal people can understand.

You may have heard of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Uncommon Thoughts on Common Things . It first came out over three decades ago and is still relevant and continues to sell today. In addition, if you like it, he has written several follow up collections. The beauty of this book is that Fulghum manages to find comfortable simplicity in the agonizing complexity of life and in doing so provides perspectives that we need to be reminded of. In addition, as an aspiring writer his folksy accessible style makes you believe that you could have written those essays just as well. I have to acknowledge that Fulghum has a gift and what he does is a lot more difficult than it may seem on the surface. Nonetheless, anything that emboldens you to sit down and write something is a good thing. Pick an essay from one of Fulghum's books, rewrite it from your own perspective or in your own voice and you are on your way.

If you enjoyed Fulghum's essays and want to continue in that direction, you can try something by Dinty W. Moore. Yes, when I first heard that name, I thought of the beef stew too. However, I have since discovered that both the author and the stew derived their names from a 1920's cartoon character. Nonetheless, Moore has written a couple of accessible collections of essays for people who want to write essays. They are The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction and Crafting The Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Non-Fiction .

At the risk of going off the deep end again with philosophical observations, I have to point out a couple of phrases in the title of Moore's book and tie them in with the previous post. First, we have the phrase "personal essay" which acknowledges that there is no objective reality, only difference subjective impressions of it. I express my experience or reactions. You express your experience or reactions. Hopefully, there is some overlap. Second, we have the phrase "creative nonfiction". Isn't fiction supposed to be creative and nonfiction is supposed to be objective. Not so fast. If there is no single objective reality then one might resort to more creative techniques to express a reality as they perceive or experience it.

But, fear not. I may go off the deep end from time to time, and you are welcome to ignore me when I do. But, Moore stays at a level where you can easily understand him. So, you are safe trying his works. You can also pick one of Moore's essays and rewrite it in your voice to see how that goes. And, if you are looking for more ideas for your daily writing, just Google 'personal essay prompts' and you will find more suggestions that you can possibly imagine. 

Finally, if you have gotten on a roll with these two and want to keep rolling I would suggest Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. First of all, Joan Didion is a wonderful, deceptively accessible writer. By that I mean that her writing is easy to understand and yet there is more to it than is seen on the surface. You can read an essay once and enjoy it, then read it again and realize that there were things you missed the first time around.

The essay from which the books gets its name describes some of Didion's experiences in California during the 1960's, a time when many people found it difficult make sense out of what was going on, especially in California. In fact, a lot of people thought the world was falling apart. Perhaps it was. The title Slouching Towards Bethlehem is borrowed from a line in a poem The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats which says (heavily edited for emphasis):

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

There is an obvious religious interpretation to these lines. But, that is far from the only interpretation. Many people who lived through the 1960's felt that the world was tearing itself apart; that the center may not hold. But, wait, don't a lot of people today feel that the world is tearing itself apart; that the center many not hold? Can we learning anything from the turbulence of the 1960's that would be useful to help us understand what is going on today? What if we go back further? Weren't the 1920's turbulent as well? Did the world tear itself apart or did the center hold? Is there a pattern here? Can we use that pattern to gain some perspective?

I will leave that there and make one more point before closing. There is another book, that I know of, that also borrows its title from that poem. It is Does the Center Hold? An Introduction to Western Philosophy by Donald Palmer. It is a truly delightful and extremely accessible introductory book on Western Philosophy. But, the point I wanted to make was that these two books are connected by a hundred year old poem which suggests that the turbulence we experience is not new. It has been going on a long, long time.

There is a tried old joke about a person who groks the interconnections between everything and says "everything is connected" while blowing out a cloud of pot smoke. Whether that person is experiencing a cosmic epiphany or a cannabis rush is not for me to say. But, things are a lot more connected than most people realize. Somebody does something that influences somebody else. They in turn do something that influences yet another person. This happens in art, literature, philosophy, music and even science. In fact, it would be hard to find any creative effort where this does not occur. Digging down a little more deeply and finding connections between things often puts the world in a different, more satisfying and more meaningful perspective.

Who Wrote the First Essay?

Believe it or not, we actually do know who wrote the first essay. It was Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) who invented the form and also coined the term "essay". How he came up with the term is worthy of exploring as well. The word "essay" is related to another word that may already be familiar to you and that is the word "assay". Assay is a term used in mining and metallurgy meaning "the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality" (yes, another Googled definition). You may have heard the term in a movie about the Old West when somebody panning for gold took the gold into town to have it assayed, or tested for purity. To assay the gold is to test it in an attempt to determine its quality. Now we can see why lessor used meanings of the word "essay" include test and attempt.

But, what kind of  test or attempt is an essay? It is an attempt to get your thoughts, feeling or musings down on paper in a coherent fashion. Montaigne wrote essays on a very wide variety of his thoughts or musings and these essays are available today on Amazon as Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays . Before you rush to Amazon to buy it, I should warn you -it is over 1200 pages. The modern essay form was yet to evolve. In fact, it would be another four centuries before we developed our modern appreciation for brevity. And, Montaigne wrestled verbosely with a lot of issues that were arising in the transition from the Middle Ages to a more Modern Worldview.

Nonetheless, Montaigne is good to know about as he did write the first essay (and, in fact, invented the word and the form). In addition, he influenced many great names including:

Rene Descartes (Father of modern Philosophy)
Francis Bacon (Father of Modern Empirical Science)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Essayist, Transcendentalist and Advocate for Free Public Education)
Friedrich Nietzsche (Impossible to Describe Briefly) 

I am going to get philosophical in order to put Montaigne and the Essay into perspective. So, if you do not have any interest in philosophy, you might want to skip the rest of this post. 

You have almost certainly heard of Rene Descartes in connection with his famous pithy line Cogito Ergo Sum or its English version I Think Therefore I Am. This represents, in the minds of many, the beginning of modern philosophy. There are heated debates on the value contributed or the harm done by Descartes which I am simply going to ignore in order to make a lessor but still important point. Prior to Descartes, philosophy focused on the material world or the world external to the individual. The early Existentialist began considering their internal subjective experiences as a legitimate focus for philosophy and this view grew until the height of Existentialism in the mid 20th century. I would argue, with great hubris, that Descartes' observation was more properly - I can feel the internal subjective experience of thinking, therefore I must exist. However, that would be a little more difficult to get on a coffee cup, poster or T-shirt. More simply, I would reword it as I Feel Therefore I Am. This obsession would eventually lead to Post Modernism which asserts that there is no objective reality only internal subjective realities which vary from one person to the next. And this, I believe, has its roots in the ruminations of Montaigne. Yes, we can blame the Might Essay for the mess we are in. But, we might also be able to use it to find our way out of the mess.

Whew! Enough philosophy! But, take heart, deeper dives such as this will not be commonplace in this blog.

The Mighty Essay

The Essay is a fundamental building block of writing. You put letters together to make words; word together to make sentences; sentences together to make paragraphs; and paragraphs together to make an Essay. Just like each of the preceding units is more than the component parts, an Essay is more than a collection of paragraphs. And, once we understand the unit of writing that the Essay represents, we can pivot to move ambitious forms of writing such as stories, journalism, creative nonfiction, and even novels. We will start with some basics about Essays in this post and circle back around to explore Essays in greater depth in subsequent posts.

Let's begin with a simple definition of an Essay which I found by Googling "essay definition". The definition that popped up provided three descriptions:

• a short piece of writing on a particular subject
• an attempt or effort
• attempt or try

While the first is the most common understanding, the second and third are more revealing. However, we will put that off for right now and focus on the first. If an Essay is  "a short piece of writing on a particular subject" one might ask - "what sorts of subjects", or "can you write an Essay about anything?"

It is customary to think of Essays as being one of four or five types. Again, from a Google search, we have:

• Expository - reporting on an event, occurrence or experience
• Descriptive - describing an occurrence or experience
• Narrative - embedding either of the previous two in a story
• Compare & Contrast - what's the difference?
• Persuasive/Argumentative - why should I believe that?

Clearly, a great deal more could be said about each of these beyond my brief descriptions. However, there is no end to the number of books on writing Essays that will drill down on that for you. What I wanted to do was to give you a sense of what common thinking on Essays entails and expand upon it a little bit. Here are some other kinds of Essays which I am coming up with off the top of my head:

• Exploratory - written to explore an idea
• Organizing - written to organize your thoughts on a given topic
• Venting - letting off steam about something
• Poor Little Me - invoking sympathy due to circumstances you have had to endure
• Unique Moments - capturing the feeling invoked by rare events such as how it feels to win the lottery

You could probably add more of your own, and indeed you should. However, if you are writing an Essay to accompany your submission of a college or job application, it would be best to stick to the common knowledge four or five. But, if you are writing an Essay to develop your writing skills, it would not hurt to be a little more creative. Here are some more creative ideas, again off the top of my head:

• Things I Think But Won't Say
• Things You Think But Won't Say
• Things I Think You Think That I Won't Say
• Things Everybody Thinks That Are Wrong
• Things Nobody Thinks But Everybody Should

Most people associate Essays with college admission applications. Thus, the idea of writing an Essay strikes fear in the heart of most people. This is unfortunate because Essays provide excellent writing practice. If you want to develop your writing skills, set aside 15-30 minutes everyday where you start with a blank piece of paper and a topic idea. Write one page of no more than 300 words. Save what you have written and periodically go back and read older Essays to see what you need to improve and what did improve over time. The only judge that matters here is you. In fairness I should point out that many people feel that they need to belong to a writers group where members of the group provide feedback to improve the writing of the other members. That is fine to start out. But, I would point out two concerns to think about. First, how do you know that the feedback from other members is any good? And, second, unless the group is going to write your book, essays or stories for you, you will eventually have to figure out how to critique your own writing. What I would suggest, as an alternative, is that you find some authors that you like, read their works carefully, and see what you can learn from them. 

As far as topics go, write about anything that you think might be fun to write about. Here are some ideas (yes, again, off the top of my head):

• Why Your Cat Really Hates You
• Would the World Really Be Better If Evey One Really Did Get Along?
• Why I Think That the Earth is a Day Care Center and I Was Dropped Off Here by Aliens
• What Does My Dream Date Look Like?
• Why Writing Essays Will Make Me Super Smart

Once you start writing Essays every day, new ideas will pop into your head at an alarming rate. Jot them down in a notebook and when you need an idea pick one that looks like fun. I am a big proponent of making it fun. There are certainly times when writing can be extremely arduous. But, there is no need to make it any more difficult than it has to be. On that point of making it fun, I must add that you should feel free to ignore any of my recommendations about time spent writing, number of words and so on. You may prefer to write for longer or shorter times. You might prefer to write more or less words. You might want to start an essay one day and finish it another day. This is all fine. Anything that makes you look forward to picking up your paper and pencil in order to write something is a good thing. 

I would like to close with a slightly different definition of an Essay. An Essay is a complete thought or as complete as it can be given the constraints of time, perseverance, writing skills, and understanding of the topic. It is about a specific topic written for a specific purpose or at least as specific as the focus of the writer will allow.

Writing Every Day

If you want to become proficient at something, it is best to practice, regularly, every day. I write nearly every day and have been doing so for years. At this point, not writing would be like skipping lunch or missing my favorite TV show. And, on any given day, not writing would be more difficult than writing something. Nonetheless, I can see where people might ask - what in the world do you write about everyday? So, I thought I would provide some answers. I will sketch out a few ideas here and elaborate on some in future posts.

The easiest and most common way to start writing everyday would be to keep a daily diary.  At the end of the day, jot down what occurred during the course of that day. If you want to get fancy, you can comment on the events, and if you want to get even fancier, you can try to organize your reactions to the day's events into some sort of pattern. Or, better yet, a recurring pattern. There are many variations on this theme and finding variations is a good way to keep the words flowing. For example, you may decide to write in the morning and explore what you intend to do for the day. Later, that evening, you can look over your plans and make a few remarks about how it all turned out. If you are not comfortable with the idea of a diary, call it a journal. And if you are not comfortable pouring your inner thoughts into it, you can step back and be more dispassionate. Write as though you are someone observing your life rather than the one experiencing it.

If writing your inner thoughts makes you feel vulnerable you can write on loose leaf paper, keep the papers in a three ring binder, and go through periodically and shred any that you never want anyone to see. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic Emperor of Rome, (played by Richard Harris in Gladiator) kept a journal of his inner thoughts. On his deathbed, he asked his friends to burn it. They did not, and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is available on Amazon. So, if you are really bothered by people reading your inner thoughts, the shredding will give you a little peace.

A variation on the daily diary is the journal as therapy. Here you try to sort out all those thoughts in your head that plague you from time to time or even daily. What is it that bothers you? Why does it bother you? Does it bother other people? What would other people think if they knew that this bothered you? Is this something you should get over or just live with? Would others agree with your assessment? Perhaps you are afraid of dogs or want to travel but keep putting it off. Perhaps you are uncomfortable around people that you do not know well or you don't like change. Writing about these things helps you explore them and, in the process, you might learn something important about yourself. As with the diary, you can be as personal or dispassionate as you choose.  You can ever get creative. Write a paragraph or two as your inner self, then step back and be your own mentor - commenting on what you just wrote. If you want to be a little weird about it, you can get a self hat and a mentor hat. Then switch hats depending on which perspective you are writing from.

Another variation on this theme would be the journal to organize your thoughts. We all have way too much noise in our heads which people deal with in a wide variety of ways from meditation, to drinking, to sublimating it in other activities. But, this is like dealing with a messy closet by putting a lock on it rather than going in and cleaning up the mess.

Once you get comfortable with daily journal entries, there are endless ways to carry the practice into other areas. For example, if you take a trip somewhere, you can keep a travel log. If you are embarking on a big change of some kind, you can record your experiences so that you can make sense out of them later.

It takes a lot of practice to learn how to write well. And these daily efforts are practice, not the end product. They are ways to keep you writing as you learn how to write. If you have no idea how to sing and you go to a Karaoke bar, you will certainly make a fool out of yourself. And if you sit down to write the Great American Novel without having put in the writing practice, the outcome will be the same.

Daily journal entries can get you started with the practice of daily writing. As you advance, you can start writing essays and then short stories. But, we will pick that up in future posts.

How Do You Know That You Are a Writer?

There are three answers to this question that I can think of as I write this post. First, you are a writer if you get paid to write. This covers the gamut of professional writers from authors, journalists and screen writers all the way to people who write laws, communications blurbs, and even greeting cards. We feel that if somebody gets paid to do something, then they deserve the respect (or disrespect) of carrying the mantel of the profession.

Second, you may be a writer because you say you are. Writer's workshops often encourage attendees to think of them self as a writer and even tell friends and relatives that they are a writer as a means of boosting their confidence. In this category there are writers who have never published anything but are struggling to be heard none the less. Recently, there was a lovely book on the bestseller list called Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen. It was her only book and it wasn't published until she was 70. Was she not a writer until this book was published? Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960 and then nothing. She did publish another book called Go Set a Watchman in 2015 but that had been written in the 1950's before Mockingbird. Did she stop being a writer after Mockingbird? I don't think so. I think being a writer means a little more than just being paid to write, although getting paid is, in itself, an accomplishment.

Is it possible for someone to say "I get paid to write, but I am not really a writer"? I think this is entirely possible. There are endless people who get paid to do something, but do not identify with what they get paid for. There are teachers who hate teaching, lawyers who hate practicing law, plumbers who hate plumbing, cooks who hate cooking, and so on. Life drops us into a profession and we do it to survive. That does not mean it is our calling. So there must be more to being a writer than just getting paid to do it.

I will be retiring at the end of this month. I don't need to earn a living to survive. I can do anything I want. Well, maybe not anything. Eloping with Jennifer Aniston is probably not in the cards for me. But, fantasies aside, I have a lot of options. One way to think about whether your job is related to your calling is to ask if you won the sweepstakes tomorrow would you quit your job or keep on working. If you would quit, it is not your calling. If you would stay, it is, at least, one of your callings.

So, this brings us to the third answer. You may be a writer if writing is a core part of who you are. Bear with my indulgence as I lay out a few bits about myself. My Aunt Val was a freelance writer her entire career. She did ghost writing, editing, and some books under her own name. If you go on Amazon.com and type "Valerie Moolman" under books you can see some of the work she did. Not always glamorous, but it paid the bills. Her father, my grandfather ( or Oupa as they said in Afrikaans) was a newspaper man, later in press relations, later yet as a writer for the South African government translating legal work from English into Afrikaans or vise versa. So you could say there is some genetic component to my calling as a writer. However, that is tenuous as very few children of writers become successful writers in turn. So, there must be a bit more.

I did terrible in high school, not because I didn't write but because I didn't read, nor do homework, nor pay attention. There was no chance upon graduating from high school that I could go to college. So, I went to work for the government instead. The trauma of this exposure to the mundane snapped me out of my detachment and I attempted to redeem myself at a local community college. Oddly enough, I had to take two remedial courses in order to prepare myself for classes where I could accumulate real college credit. These two courses, five hours per semester each, were in English and Math. This is ironic as these were two areas that I would come to excel at later.

My first real class was a class in English Composition. I had to write a paper for the course and the teacher's comments praised the quality of my writing. Apparently, I had a gift of some sort. To say I was stunned does not quite cover it. The fact that I could do something that would be considered, by somebody who actually knew something, as having merit, was beyond my comprehension. I took the same instructor the next semester who commented on a paper that I did not achieve what I was capable of achieving. I did not reach the standard I had set in the previous semester. Wow! Not only did I have a gift, but I had a standard too!

This gave me confidence in not only my writing but in my academic work as well. I began to look forward to chances to write something and began being bolder in my writing which made it stand out more. Most of the time, although  not always, my efforts were recognized. But, I did not think of myself as a writer. I though of myself as a something else who had a gift that would help me pursue that something else whatever it may be. But, to be a writer, you have to be able to write something that others will see as something that could not have been written by just anybody.

While writing as a profession fell off of my radar screen for a couple of decades, I still wrote journals almost daily. I found that journal writing helped me organize my thoughts and get stuff that was rattling around in my head out of my head and on to paper where I could examine it. This is another thing about writers, not all, but many. We write because we have to write. My head fills up with ideas and the only way to clear my head is to write. Once I have written something, my head is clear and ready to fill up again. Lord Byron once said the he wrote to keep from going crazy. I know the feeling. In fact, I know it well. When I cleaned out my basement many years later, I tossed three or four dozen spiral notebooks that I had accumulated from my compulsive journal writing.

It wasn't until the late 1990's when I started to think seriously about creative writing. I had published several papers on the role of stories in computer ethics and realized that if this was going to go anywhere I had better learn how to write stories. I began writing short pieces and sending them out to colleagues asking what they thought. In hindsight, they probably thought I was nuts. But, I was determined and they were tolerant. In a "fish or cut bait" moment, I decide to commit to writing a full length detective story in serial fashion where I would sent out a chapter each week for comments. To sweeten the pot, I used several of my colleagues as characters in the story. I felt this would heighten there attention. It was a bit of a high wire act with no plot, characters that I know, and a weekly delivery schedule. But, it was a huge success. I found that the story wrote itself. They characters argued in my head about where the story should go. And I was largely just the scribe.

Several years later, motivated by my work in the role of stories in computer ethics, I decide to put it to the test again and see if I could teach students how to write stories that explore an ethical issue in computer technology. Following models of software design, I created a design process for stories and debugged the process in a creative writing class on writing stories to explore the ethics of technology. I taught this course for six or seven years and discovered a lot about the technical aspects of writing stories.

So, as I approached retirement, and thought about what I might do as an encore career, I thought that it might be fun to write. So, several years ago I began writing daily essays. I would start with a topic that I had no idea what to write about and start writing. Stuff appeared in my head and I wrote it down. How this works may be the topic of a future post. But, for now, I will say that I have collected four or five hundred of these essays. They may be selected and edited for a future book. Or they may simply serve as writing practice. I don't know what will happen, and I never do.

In fact, that is a good note to close on. I had no idea what I was going to write when I started this post. This final version is a first draft lightly edited. I have an active muse and I am her servant. I have gone on a bit too long here. But, that is not unusual for me. People often say that getting emails from me is like trying to drink from a fire hose. I understand. But, I cannot help it. I am, after all, a writer.

My Encore Career as a Writer  

After 20 years in the trenches of software development, followed by 27 years as an Academic, I will be retiring at the end of this year to pursue a new career as a writer. Writing has always been one of my guilty pleasures. I write almost every day and have written but not published stories, novels and essays in addition to over four dozen scholarly papers and over 150 book and article reviews that were were published. Now, I get to write for fun and will publish for fun as well on Amazon's Kindle and Createspace platform. My first book will be a collection of short essays called "The Meaning of Life" which will explain, in simple terms, what we mean by the 'meaning of life' and how one can find more meaning if they are in search of it. I am writing short, easily readable, essays that should be accessible to anyone. It is my goal to be accessible rather than scholarly. Each essay is about one hand written page or about 300 words. I am hoping that you will read the essays one at a time, find something worth thinking about, and then come back for the next when you are done ruminating.(It may have been better to use the word 'thinking' rather than 'ruminating' but my muse often has the last word on word choices. I try my best to know my place.)

I set up this blog as supplement to My Facebook Page because Facebook posts should be kept short and some topics may take a little more space. When that happens, I can put a teaser blurb on Facebook with a link to this blog. We will see how well that works.

What I plan to write here are tidbits about the writing process. That part will be of interesting to anyone who is thinking about self publishing or someone who is self publishing and wants a few new ideas.

In addition, I will post bits and pieces of things that I find interesting whether it is related to writing or not. I am always running into things that I find interesting, and, if you have an insatiable curiosity as I do, you may want to browse occasionally to see what I have stumbled on to.