Researching the Essay
I’ve embodied the role of researcher these last 3 days. I fear a disorderly private spiral, yet also, I might be more obsessed with Essay Architecture than I’ve ever been.
If I want to write about “the essay,” I feel like I couldn’t do so in good conscience without reading the top books on criticism (On Essays, Essayists on the Essays), the top guide books (Elements of Style, On Writing Well), a curation of literary forms, and maybe even the introductory essays to The Best American Essays series since 1986. Throw in a few hundred essays too. This isn’t so unreasonable. And it’s definitively not “avoidance,” as long as I write through the whole process.
What definitely has to change though is the nature of publishing. At the year’s start, I set a plan to carve through pattern-by-pattern: 1.1 > 1.2, >1.3 > 2.1. Now, I’m more so like a gas filling all the crevices of the hyper object, collecting specimens, and slotting them into a map. I should probably just be hyper-publishing everything I find, every highlight, without much thought or strategy. If my process is chaotic, my publishing should be chaotic. And yet, at the end, the order will present itself.