Next | Blog2 index | Previous
Tue, 7 September 2004
Writing tells me what I think
The programmer Paul Graham made his fortune selling Viaweb to Yahoo back in the dot-com boom, so now he writes programming languages, textbooks and essays. Not just any old essays either; Graham's essays have three unusual characteristics:
- He writes like my idea of a writer: clear, precise, vivid on topics that most people would expect to be bored by. Think Asimov on Chemistry.
- He writes about thinking - about taboos, about the similarities between programming and painting, about why nerds are unpopular.
- He influences. His essay A Plan For Spam is one of the most influential essays of the past decade: he handed technologists an actionable, fleshed-out, you-can-believe-it strategy to suppress a plague that was strangling email. Within a few months independent programmers had turned that plan into software I can see processing my email as I write this sentence.
Now Graham has written an essay about essay-writing, called The Age of the Essay. In it, he crystallises something I was planning to set out myself: why I read and write essays. Irritatingly, he says it far better than I would have done if I'd started from scratch:
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history ... to Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.
In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.
But not quite. Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.
I hate writing, a fact that surprises anyone who knows that I am a part-time writer and used to be a full-time one. Many writers love writing. As a young newspaper journalist I had a colleague, Andrew Mole, who had moved into journalism from the police force. Andrew had notebooks full of the stuff he'd written from his experiences as a cop around Wallaroo in rural South Australia. Andrew was a compulsive writer. I have never so much as kept a diary.
I write for only one reason: so that I know what I think.
