Welcome to Essay Architecture. The essay below, “A Pattern Language” is a good introduction to this framework. All of the dimension pages (Idea, Form, Voice) are available to free subscribers, while the element and pattern pages are for paid subscribers. Each pattern page includes an overview, why it matters, an example, how to implement it, scoring criteria, and related patterns. The goal is for this to be a “living book” that gets populated with new examples each month.

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An essay is consciousness frozen in words; it is an artifact that captures the thoughts, feelings, and events that transpire as you explore and makes sense of an Idea you care about. There are no rules or limits on what’s worth writing. An idea can be driven by a question or story, a dilemma or theory, a rumor, argument, confusion, war, childbirth, accidental psychedelic experience, dog euthanasia, economic indicators, toothpaste conspiracy theories, etc. It can be today’s shower-thought, yesterday’s grievance, or an idea that’s haunted you for a decade.

I hesitate to offer any prescriptive method on “how to come up with good ideas.” Sometimes they come from the belly button. My best recommendation is to write down every mild epiphany you have, ideally in prose, ideally legible enough to share with a friend, ideally 3 times per day, and if you’re crazy and jobless, 100 times per day. I’ll say this: don’t write the ideas you think you need to write about; write down what’s already passing through your mind. The best ideas come from paying attention, from patient, endless probing.

So while the idea of starting ideas is unsystematic, mystical, and mostly random, I do think there are learnable patterns in how you articulate the thing in your lap. A fisherman can go on adventures of endless variety, but there are only so many ways to skin a fish.

You can think of an essay as a collection of little ideas (your Material (1)) that all work together to support one big idea (your Thesis (2)), that you eventually compress into a crystallized idea (your Title (3)). Geometrically, ideas are about centrality. A bunch of planets orbit a central star that has to be named.

You can start at any scale. Sometimes you wake up from a dream with a Title that jingles. Sometimes you have a weird, specific Thesis (ie: the sitcom Seinfeld marked the decline of western civilization) but don’t have any evidence yet. Sometimes you collect a mosaic of Material that all seem connected through some invisible web, but you have to write to find out why.

Regardless of where you start, there are two opposite modes that help you sift through an ideascape: divergence and convergence (coined by JP Guildford in 1956). To diverge is to be open and open-minded, to chase down tangents, to imagine a world of potential in even the stupidest detail, to drop all filters and see how any thing connects to everything. To converge is to be a ruthless editor. Through divergence you discover a better center of gravity, and through convergence you let go of anything outside of its pull.

It is natural to fall in love with your own ideas, but you will have to delete a lot more than you write. An essay is not a chronological record of your thinking. Drafts are meant to be shed. Writing lets you explore the edges of your terrain; but once you’ve become a parkmaster, it’s your job to pick one landmark for someone to visit. An essay is an opportunity to share a single idea at max potency. Do not try to put the whole park in prose. You’ll kill the trees. The goal isn’t to see how much you can cram (word count is not impressive); the goal is to reach the highest possible density of meaning.

The good news is, all the ideas you cut from your current essay are seeds that can sprout into future essays. Unlike books, you’ll be able to produce many essays in your life, so have faith that each idea will have its moment. Let each one breathe, and use hyperlinks if you must. Pick one idea and take it seriously.

When ideas are properly scoped and sculpted, they become linguistic viruses that enter and change the mind of the reader, so write responsibly. By unifying a multi-dimensional range of material around a kernel of truth and giving it a name, you give somebody a new lens to their reality. The essay is folk technology that turns human experience into transferrable wisdom. We could use some of that.

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In the science-fiction movie Arrival, there is a species of octopus-like aliens who read non-linearly; they communicate through intricate rings of ink, and are able to process the beginning and resolution simultaneously. Unfortunately, our readers are not atemporal aliens. Humans read linearly. We are trapped in time. Since all essays have a start and end, we need to think about Form, the linear path we arrange through our Material (1).

Conceiving, editing, and polishing form is one of the hardest aspects of essay writing, and so, naturally, writers have invented all sorts of ways to devalue it. The most common way is to ignore it: “as long as your voice is distinct, form doesn’t matter,” or, “however it comes out is the way it’s meant to be,” or simply, “first thought, best thought.” Some historians even imply that since the first essayist—Montaigne—went on epic digressions, that we have permission to do the same. All this ignores the curse of knowledge. The reader does not have all, if any of, the context that you have, and so if you ignore form, it’s like dropping your reader in the middle of a corn maze.

The other way to deal with form is to tame and trivialize it. Consider the Five Paragraph Essay, the Heroes Journey, or any prescriptive outline that suggests a tried-and-tested trick to avoid the terrors of structures. This makes form easy, mechanical, and predictable, but it often feels like you’re trying to cram a unique idea into a generic template. This happens in architecture too. In 1900, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote essays lamenting over cookie-cutter floor plans being stamped a million times across America.

Wright advocated for an approach called “organic architecture,” which is not about curved buildings, but about letting Form emerge from the specificities of each design problem. For building design, you need to understand the unique properties of a project—the site, the climate, the views, the program, and the clients—so that a 1-of-1 solution emerges. Through understanding the constraints in such high detail, the answer comes through organically.

In writing, this means that you can’t intuit the Form of your idea until after you’ve explored your Material through drafting. Each idea is its own beast, and it’s your task to discover the form it warrants. Your first draft is for yourself, your second draft is for a stranger. First you find it, then you convey it.

While a universal “template” would make every essay look the same, a series of granular patterns would lead to an endless amount of combinations. The smallest patterns of structure help us scope and shape Paragraphs (04), our main unit of essay composition; the biggest patterns of structure help us build Tension (06) so the reader instantly and continuously cares about the topic; and the middle patterns of Structure (05) help us arrange, select, and detail sections so the reader is always oriented, never confused.

There are two opposite modes required to discover your form. To essay means “to test” ideas by putting them on the page, but to assay means “to evaluate” those ideas. Assay is an under looked word in regards to writing, but it shares the same etymology with essay, and has alchemical undertones around melting and understanding the properties of something. You have to look carefully at what you’ve written and ask what is this? in a variety of ways. Are these two paragraphs serving the same point? (If so, combine them.) Does this section even relate to my thesis? (If not, delete it.) Does this one sentence capture the whole dilemma of the essay? (That could be a solid hook.) This is very much an act of logos, meaning, it requires the rational mind to label, categorize, judge, omit, and shift, making decisions around linearity, hierarchy, proportion, modularity, and parallelism.

This is also avoided because once you really start interrogating your form, you realize you have to start over. By thinking through Form, you often rearticulate your Thesis (02) in much higher resolution; this is exciting, until you realize you can’t manifest it through line editing, you have to redraft. Creative destruction is an unavoidable part of creation. Great essays can take 3, 7, or 15+ revisions to get right. Of course, it would be hard to run all of your writing through this intense alchemical process, but it’s worth it for the ideas that matter most to you. The more you do it, the less intimidating it becomes, and I find that only when I really wrestle with and rewrite my ideas do I advance my thinking on them.

Editing is really an act of pain transfer: grappling with the challenges of structure leads to a better time for the reader. Good structure is invisible. The reader is able to navigate through a vast terrain, but never struggles too much because the path was designed so thoughtfully. Your essay is something like a guided-meditation of linguistic epiphanies. It lives beyond you, and anyone who moves through your bold, linear path gets to have an asynchronous conversation with you.

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