Essays #amwriting

One area of writing that we’ve all heard of, but don’t often think about, are Essays. However, if we want to be published, writing and submitting essays is an opportunity the unknown author should exploit.

Essays are not just that bane of every school child’s existence—essays are where some of the best works of western literature can be found. Essays are short, magazine-length or blog post length articles. They are non-fiction and are frequently opinion pieces, but sometimes they are brief memoirs of a singular experience. Essays are pieces we have all read and which have moved us in some way, for good or ill.

In her introduction to The Best American Essays 1988, Annie Dillard claims that “The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do—everything but fake it.”

The word essay also means to attempt—and why this meaning is important will emerge later.

But let’s look at essays, starting with Sir Francis Bacon, renaissance author, courtier, and the father of deductive reasoning. The life and works of this English essayist and statesman had a major impact in his day and still resonate in modern literature. Essayes: Religious Meditations. Places of Perswasion and Disswasion. Seene and Allowed (1597) was his first published book.

The 1999 edition of The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations includes  91 quotations from the Essays. No author is quoted so many times unless their work has struck a chord with centuries of readers.

• “Knowledge itself is power.”
• “Riches are a good handmaid, but the worst mistress.”

Aldous Huxley‘s book Jesting Pilate, an Intellectual Holiday had as its epigraph, “What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer.” These lines were quoted from Bacon’s essay “Of Truth.”  Huxley himself was a brilliant essayist, and according to Wikipedia, he defined essays in this way: “essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference.” These three poles (or worlds in which the essay may exist) are:

• The personal and the autobiographical: The essayists that feel most comfortable in this pole “write fragments of reflective autobiography and look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description.”
• The objective, the factual, and the concrete-particular: The essayists that write from this pole “do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. Their art consists of setting forth, passing judgement upon, and drawing general conclusions from the relevant data.”
• The abstract-universal: In this pole “we find those essayists who do their work in the world of high abstractions,” who are never personal and who seldom mention the particular facts of experience. (end quote)

Essays offer an author the opportunity to use prose to expound ideas and values. Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays—by which he meant attempts. He used the term to characterize these short pieces as “attempts” to put his thoughts into writing. Montaigne’s essays grew out of his work that was then known as “commonplacing.” These were published books that were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Think of them as mini-encyclopedias.

Sir Francis Bacon and Aldous Huxley are two men whose works shaped modern literature, and they did it though essays.

I highly recommend reading essays to expand your imagination. Essays offer us ideas, philosophical, sociological, and ask us to examine our values.  This examination of the world through the eyes of essayists offers us many insights which will make their way into our own work in ways both seen and unseen, such as Huxley’s reference of Bacon’s work.

Some contemporary essayists I have read and who left an impression on me (some good, some bad) are:

John McPhee, The Search for Marvin Gardens published in the September 9, 1972 issue of The New Yorker

Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1959)

David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster” (originally appeared in Gourmet, 2004)

George Saunders, “The Braindead MegaPhone” (Essays by George Saunders) (published by Riverhead, 2007)

Norman Mailer was not my cup of tea, but he might be yours. Great writing is not always comfortable, but it always challenges your view of the world. I didn’t like Mailer’s voice or style.

Essays most frequently appear in magazines, so that is where to look for awesome contemporary work by today’s best-known authors of mainstream fiction—and much of it is sitting around in waiting-rooms the world over. If you fly Alaska Airlines (as I usually always do) take a look at that magazine they provide you with. You will find essays by authors like Scott Driscoll.

Essays are also frequently referred to as “Creative Non-Fiction” which sounds like an oxymoron—after all, “creative truthing” is “lying.” Nowadays “creative truthing” is business as usual from Washington D.C., but politics aside, get creative with your ideas and philosophies—put them in an essay.

Several prestigious literary magazines are open for submissions, a mix of well-known and little-known or new magazines that welcome creative non-fiction: memoirs, personal essays, lyrical essays, and more. Go to the website, Authors Publish, and there you will find a list of publications seeking submission.

You can also find a long list of open calls at Submittable. I trust and use this app to find open calls and to track where my own submissions are in the process.

Credits and Attributions:

Wikipedia contributors, “Essay,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Essay&oldid=815813680 (accessed December 18, 2017).

Wikipedia contributors, “Essays (Francis Bacon),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Essays_(Francis_Bacon)&oldid=811671029 (accessed December 18, 2017).

Essays–the vegan discusses Bacon and other meaty reads, ©2015, by Connie J. Jasperson  https://conniejjasperson.com/2015/08/10/essays-the-vegan…ther-meaty-reads/