Form

Have you designed a bold, linear path so a reader without context is both oriented and intrigued?

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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