I’ve never once written an essay about a footnote I read in another essay. Or at any rate, I do not remember doing so. But the fourth footnote of Paul Graham’s latest essay is worth the exercise:
Sometimes this process begins before you start writing. Sometimes you’ve already figured out the first few things you want to say. Schoolchildren are often taught they should decide everything they want to say, and write this down as an outline before they start writing the essay itself. Maybe that’s a good way to get them started — or not, I don’t know — but it’s antithetical to the spirit of essay writing. The more detailed your outline, the less your ideas can benefit from the sort of discovery that essays are for.
https://paulgraham.com/best.html
My dad taught me to write essays this way, back when I was in the third standard. I used to make an outline of what I was going to write about, and then I used to write out the essay. Eventually, I got into the habit of writing out the outline and then the essay during my examinations as well, and for many years, that is how I wrote.
But not a single blogpost here on EFE has been written in that fashion, and for the last decade or so – maybe more – I’ve given up on the habit of first creating an outline.
These days, I sit and I start writing. I have no idea where the essay is going to go, or if it is going to go anywhere at all. The act of writing raises questions, ideas and related concepts in my head, and the essay takes itself there.
I’m not claiming that this produces good essays. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. What it does do, for me, is it helps me think through whatever it is that I am writing about.
And I wish this happened rather more frequently, but every now and then, it also helps me figure out what I want to write about next. That is, the act of writing doesn’t just help me answer questions that arise as I write, but when I’m on a roll, it helps me generate new ones as well.
Ad that is why that footnote resonated ever so much. Because I agree today with the point that Paul Graham is making in the fourth footnote of his essay: creating an outline is antithetical to the spirit of essay writing. Not knowing where you’re going, and figuring it out as you go along is a good way to write an essay. Or to live life, for that matter.
This reminds me, as do so many things, of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
In my mind now is an image of a huge, long railroad train, one of those 120-boxcar jobs that cross the prairies all the time with lumber and vegetables going east and with automobiles and other manufactured goods going west. I want to call this railroad train “knowledge” and subdivide it into two parts: Classic Knowledge and Romantic Knowledge.
…Romantic Quality, in terms of this analogy, isn’t any “part” of the train. It’s the leading edge of the engine, a two-dimensional surface of no real significance unless you understand that the train isn’t a static entity at all. A train really isn’t a train if it can’t go anywhere. In the process of examining the train and subdividing it into parts we’ve inadvertently stopped it, so that it really isn’t a train we are examining. That’s why we get stuck. The real train of knowledge isn’t a static entity that can be stopped and subdivided. It’s always going somewhere. On a track called Quality. And that engine and all those 120 boxcars are never going anywhere except where the track of Quality takes them; and romantic Quality, the leading edge of the engine, takes them along that track.
Pirsig, Robert M.. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values (p. 254). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
You shouldn’t write to show others what you know. You should write to learn what you know, to learn what connections can be made between what you know, and to understand what you don’t know.
But the bottomline is this: you should be writing.
Please, write!
EconForEverybody 