E: Essay Architecture

“Deliberate practice” is a step above “purposeful practice.” Purposeful practice is about picking one thing to work on based on your own perceived weakness. Deliberate practice is about knowing the full map of a craft, pursuing all ends at once, and following the guidance of an expert.

I’ve been recommended to check out the book Peak, on athletic pe

This Joseph Conrad is very similar to the Sontag quote with “hear, see, feel.” This is making me more confident about how I structured voice in the Essay Architecture framework.

"My task which I am trying to achieve is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and that

Two latest essay books:

• Leslie Jamison — Make It Scream, Make It Burn

• John Jeremiah Sullivan — Pulphead

The prompt of all prompts:

Describe how a specific moment in your life is symbolic of a larger trend in your culture. Compress this phenomenon into a phrase, render it so we can see it, hear it, and feel it, and suggest what we might do about it.

A good topic sentence will:

1. Create a tension

2. Point you in the right direction

3. Delight you with elegance

Essay Architecture is about the formal analysis of a piece. It’s not about a personal, cultural, or moral analysis of a piece, but, it does suggest that you want to shape an essay in a way os that we can see and wrestle with those dimensions.

Example: Imagine someone writes an essay about getting surgery to turn themselves into a cartoon character.

Essays should be linear, that’s what makes it an essay. If you have a mosaic of paragraphs that can be shuffled in any order, that’s not an essay, those are notes, no matter how poetic the prose.

Sequence matters. Our mind works via cause-and-effect. Of course, there’s value to creating tension, by purposely time jumping, or by injecting subtle mys

If you want to start a writing habit, don’t start with essays. Write paragraphs. Shaping and editing essays from a cold start is quite hard. Instead, practice riffing paragraphs over a huge range of ideas. Publish them all somewhere, but don’t blast them.

The cashier at the Union Square Barnes and Nobles told me that the essays books were on the 4th floor, but I didn't imagine how sparse the selection would be. I found 2 cases, 10 shelves total, something like 60 linear feat of essay book spines. I wondered if the 4th floor was a microcosm, and so I acted on my urge to count shelves to know precisel