April 17, 2005
Thoughts on Essays
In my reading, I came across an article by Paul Graham. It's a good article, though fairly length. As I read it, I kept running across little quotes that I liked very much. I've provided a few of these (it took a while for me to get the idea of keeping track of them) below, linked with the thoughts I had while in reading them. I thought it would make pretty decent marterial for a post ... and I need to get to bed soon.
- An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
- Fundamentally an essay is a train of thought-- but a cleaned-up train of thought, as dialogue is cleaned-up conversation.
- 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.
- Collecting surprises is a similar process. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones. Which means, oddly enough, that as you grow older, life should become more and more surprising. When I was a kid, I used to think adults had it all figured out. I had it backwards. Kids are the ones who have it all figured out. They're just mistaken.
I agree - the writing I like to do the most happens when I really don't know what's going to happen. I just start with an idea - a question or topic, usually, and think out loud about it.
I like this way of putting it - though I don't practice it often enough. My writing suffers from too few rewrites. Rewriting is something I've heard about again and again as advice given from "the greats" of writing, but I've never found it needful. My stuff all seems to come out fine the first time. :-) I know, of course, that's only my inexperience talking, but the fact remains that I tend to be very satisfied with my writing the first time through it. I suppose, though, that my readers would prefer that I took time to go through and clean it up. That would be an interesting task ... I know that my writing has a plethora of rabbit trails (after all, there's a reason that the parenthesis, the elipses, and the dash are my favorite marks of punctutation ... ). I wonder if re-writing would remove some of those ... or at least, clean them up. I think I really should go back and rewrite something, just to see how much it changes and maybe gets better. It would be an interesting experiment, to say the least.
I wonder to what extent this is true ... if it is true, it is a wonderful truth. I suppose that it really depends on what sort of a mind you have ...
