I have been writing essays in various forms for forty years. I have been teaching students to write essays for twenty-two of those years. The conclusion I have reached, slowly and with considerable resistance to reaching it, is that essay writing is one of the longer apprenticeships in literary craft and that the casual framing of the essay as an accessible form does meaningful damage to writers who attempt to practice it seriously.
This essay is about why the apprenticeship is long, what it actually requires, and what the casual framing gets wrong.
What looks easy about essays
The essay form looks easy because the reader's experience of a good essay is one of apparent ease. The writer's voice arrives without obvious effort. The arguments unfold without apparent struggle. The prose moves without visible labor. The essay seems to have been waiting for the writer to set it down rather than to have been constructed at considerable cost.
The reader's experience of ease is the writer's specific accomplishment. A good essay has been worked over thoroughly enough that the working over is no longer visible. The labor has been absorbed into the surface. The reader experiences the result of the labor without experiencing the labor itself.
This is the source of the casual framing that damages newer essayists. Readers infer from the experienced ease that the production was easy. They are wrong. The production was the opposite of easy. The visible ease is the specific outcome of substantial invisible work.
What the apprenticeship actually involves
The apprenticeship in essay writing involves several distinct kinds of learning that develop on different timescales.
The first kind is technical command of sentence-level prose. The writer needs to be able to construct sentences that do specific work — establishing rhythm, controlling pace, managing emphasis, modulating tone — across a range of registers. This learning happens through extensive reading combined with extensive practice. It is not particularly amenable to acceleration through technique manuals because the relevant skills are not really separable from the broader judgment about what a sentence should do in a particular context.
The second kind is structural command of essay-length argument. The writer needs to be able to develop an idea across several pages without losing the thread, without padding, and without the artificial transitions that mark essay writing as constructed rather than thought. This learning happens through practice with feedback. It is hard to develop in isolation because the writer's own sense of whether an essay is working is unreliable in the absence of external response.
The third kind is the deeper learning of what to write about. The young essayist tends to write about whatever is intellectually present at the moment of writing. The mature essayist has developed judgment about which subjects warrant the form and which subjects do not. This judgment develops slowly, through accumulated experience of what produces essays worth keeping and what does not.
The fourth kind is the most difficult to describe. It is the development of a voice — not a stylistic voice, which can be achieved relatively quickly, but a substantive voice that has earned its right to speak with the authority that essays require. This development is not a matter of practice or technique. It is the slow accumulation of having actually thought about things long enough to have something worth saying about them. There is no shortcut for this kind of learning.
The casual framing problem
The casual framing of essay writing as an accessible form damages newer essayists by suggesting that the apprenticeship is shorter than it is.
Newer essayists who absorb the casual framing tend to assume that their early efforts should be producing essays comparable to the essays they admire from established essayists. When their efforts fall short, they sometimes conclude that they lack talent rather than that they are at an early stage of a long apprenticeship. The conclusion produces unnecessary discouragement.
The casual framing also encourages premature publication of work that would benefit from longer development. Newer essayists who have absorbed the framing of essay writing as accessible may not have developed the judgment to recognize that their drafts are not yet ready for readers. They publish work that does them no favors and that would have been better held back for further development.
The framing also encourages superficial engagement with the form. Essayists who absorb the casual framing may not engage seriously with the historical tradition of the form. The tradition contains substantial accumulated craft knowledge that newer essayists benefit from absorbing. Skipping this engagement on the assumption that the form does not require it produces work that is not as good as it could be.
What honest engagement with the apprenticeship looks like
Honest engagement with the essay apprenticeship involves specific practices that the casual framing tends to obscure.
Sustained reading of essays from across the form's history. Montaigne, Bacon, Hazlitt, Lamb, Emerson, Woolf, Orwell, Didion, Baldwin, Sontag, Vivian Gornick, current essayists working at the highest level. The reading does not need to be exhaustive but does need to be sustained enough to absorb the form's accumulated craft knowledge.
Sustained writing practice across multiple registers and subjects. The essay is a flexible form. The writer needs to develop capability across the form's range rather than only within a narrow comfort zone. This requires writing about subjects that initially feel uncomfortable and in registers that initially feel forced.
Sustained engagement with feedback from readers whose judgment the writer trusts. The development of essayist judgment requires external response. Writers who develop only in isolation tend to develop in idiosyncratic ways that may or may not produce work readers find valuable.
Patience with the timeline. The apprenticeship takes years and continues for the writer's career. Essays produced in year three of practice are not the essays the same writer will produce in year fifteen. Accepting this rather than expecting earlier work to match later potential is part of the apprenticeship's discipline.
What the long apprenticeship produces
The writers who undertake the long apprenticeship produce work that the writers who treat the form casually do not produce. The difference is not always immediately visible — competent essays can come from various levels of experience — but is visible across a writer's body of work over time.
The writers who undertook the apprenticeship produce essays that develop across decades. Their later work draws on capability that their earlier work could not have achieved. The career has substance that grows rather than that plateaus or declines.
The writers who treated the form casually tend to produce essays that flatter the moment of their production but do not develop. The work is interchangeable across time. The career does not accumulate.
The difference matters not only to the writer but to the reader. Essays produced through the long apprenticeship reward the reader differently than essays produced casually. The reader who returns to such essays years later finds work that holds up. The reader who returns to casually-produced essays often finds work that does not.
What I tell beginning essayists
When I work with beginning essayists I tell them roughly this. You are at the beginning of a long apprenticeship. The casual framing of the essay form will tell you that it is accessible and that you should be producing essays of significant quality from early in your practice. The framing is misleading. The form rewards sustained development across years.
You should read essays seriously and across the form's history. You should write essays seriously and across a range of subjects and registers. You should engage with feedback from readers whose judgment you trust. You should accept that your early work is early work and that the work you will be capable of in your tenth year of serious practice is not the work you are capable of in your first.
You should also accept that this apprenticeship is one of the more rewarding ones available in literary craft. The essay form has produced extraordinary work across its history. The opportunity to participate in that tradition seriously is genuinely valuable, even if the participation requires the patience that the casual framing tends to obscure.
The long apprenticeship is the actual path. The casual framing is the obstacle that some essayists never get past. Recognizing the framing for what it is — a misleading account of how the form actually develops — is the first step in actually developing within it.
