An Essay on Essys
Like you, my relationship with essays started in school. And it was very one-sided. Essays were more into me than I was into them. I wasn’t into them at all, actually. I’d be mortified if I was ever caught with one. If every someone caught me doing an essay I’d go red and crumple it up, making up some lie that I was doing my maths homework or something.
I didn’t mind a short story as a teenager. It gave me space to make stuff up, to conjure lives I’d never led. Whenever I sat an English exam, I’d always skip over the essay and find the short story prompt. See, it was the non-fiction element that had me stumped. How could I make anything that’s real sound interesting? It seemed an unreasonable request. Essays were sources of suffering in school. If we misbehaved we’d be threatened with essays that had titles like, ‘An Essay on the Inside of a Tennis Ball.’ I couldn’t have thought of anything more tedious.
So naturally, when I started taking writing seriously, I cut my teeth with short stories. Because I’d always liked them. I knew I could make things up. I’d write my little stories and be happy with them. The more I wrote the more I realised how many details of my own life were peppered into these fictional creations. The non-fiction elements gave characters depth, helped to build believable worlds. I began to see the value in non-fiction. And then, slowly, essays became more attractive. They matured, or I did, or we both did – after spending my youth running from essay questions, I developed a flirtation in my adulthood. Essays weren’t as bland as they once appeared. I now had a palate for them. I was even choosing to read essays in my spare time. David Foster-Walace, Sloane Crosley, Albert Camus. These writers, and so many others, making the mundanities of life seem interesting. What a revelation. I began to wonder if an essay about a tennis ball might actually be a page-turner.
I had been rash in my youth, unready for the essay. Which is probably just as well because I didn’t know how to write back then.
What was once a severe disdain for education became a flourishing romance. Whenever I had the kernel of an idea to write, I had to figure out what is was – is it a poem, a short-story, or an essay? And I’ve often gotten this wrong on the first try. Many of the essays in this book have a poetic sibling, an idea I thought to be poem that turned out to be an essay. It’s difficult to know, it’s really just a feeling. I’ll finish the poem-version and feel a lack of something. The idea needs more detail, the poem too brief to fully capture what I’m trying to say.
Other times, I may say in a two thousand words what could really be captured in two verses. So it’s a trial and error enterprise. And it’s strange to look at an essay and know it began its life as a poem inside my head. Because the forms are so different. A poem becoming an essay is like the sun becoming the moon – they reflect each other, but they do very different things.
The challenge of an essay is in its layers. A good essay will be trying to investigate more than one subject at a time. But these subjects will harmonise. Of course, you can just tell a story, something that really happened. These have value too, especially if something incredibly unlikely or bizarre has happened. But the essays that I find myself re-reading are ones that are layered thick with meaning, while still maintaining a narrative flow that leaves us wanting more. And this is far easier said than done. You have to keep coming back to an essay from different angles to find they layers that will make sense. Like Tetris, really. If you don’t fit the pieces together seamlessly you’re left with a pointed, uneven thing that’s hard to look at.
A Brief Inhalation is my first collection of essays that isn’t themed. Lonely Boy was about mental health, but this is trying to capture moments, realisations, learning, that have made is hard to breathe. And some of these moments happened at a time when I thought life was too mundane to write about. The nonfiction of our reality too boring to bother capturing. I was dead wrong about that. I just didn’t know at the time.
Creative essay writing is storytelling. You’re a good storyteller if you can captivate a reader, a listener, despite what it is you’re talking about. I love the challenge of that. Being able to use our experiences to connect, to encourage empathy, compassion, understanding – isn’t that the goal of all writing?