Practice
I cannot tell you how to write an essay.
The essay has never been a fixed form, and Essayism is wider still. It includes habits of attention, ways of asking questions, and approaches to understanding that often resist prescription. The contributions of the essayists mentioned in the first two Essayist posts demonstrate the breadth of the approach.
What I can do is discuss my own practice.
The apple and gravity
Essayism is, for me, a disposition. By this, I mean a way of being, shaped by a number of characteristics. It seems to be a combination of personality, faculty, and acquired training and procedure. It is something about the way I am in the world.
It would be easy to say I am driven by intense curiosity. It would also be substantially inadequate. It is no more than a label and says nothing of how the world touches me. It would be more revealing to say that there is nothing in the world that is not interesting. There is no fact, no phenomenon, no event, nor any other thing that leaves me unengaged. It is as if I am Newton’s apple falling irresistibly towards the world.
Unlike the apple, I seem to have some choice as to where my attention will fall. And it is not uncommon for that choice to be shaped by judgement: things could be better, be different, or even remain the same. I have an ability to think in certain ways, and I have acquired procedures and methods through years of practice.
I don’t wake up and think, “I’ll write an essay today.” Neither do I plan time into any kind of writing schedule. My disposition here can best be explored in Sigi’s encounter with The Eskeratz clock.
Rather, as I have hinted, something catches my attention. And I begin to write, to note it, as a means of releasing myself from its immediacy. It is doubly therapeutic because writing itself is a compulsion: a means of untangling immediate experience. It is the manner in which I stay content in the world. The angry young man transformed into the consciously reflective elder.
I understand from biology that a fish must choose to stop swimming, if fishes have choices at all. Similarly, if I am to relax, I must choose to step away from being in this disposition called Essayism. Otherwise, it can become a condition of all my engagement with the world.
I have always organised my life, my surfaces, my writing destinations to support this disposition, to obviate any friction in the process of observing, thinking, and creating. Any destination for my words that offered minimal editorial adjustment was always well regarded, especially since I earned my living as a freelance writer. I recall that in the late 70s I declined ever to write again for one publication. I had offered an essay on a particular economic and social phenomenon, and the editor inserted the word “mass” right before the word “movement”, without consulting me before print. The pressures on one’s own integrity can be considerable. I admire writers who seem to be able to navigate these tensions honourably and successfully.
Attention
My writing is akin to the fish swimming. It acquires a particular expression of exercise when something draws my attention. It might be something quite ordinary. A road junction, for example, that seems not to accommodate the way people actually travel through it. I notice it. It appears at once to be both ordinary and interesting. But the world has not changed between observation and cognition. It is my perception that transforms its categorical condition from ordinary to interesting. Something about the relation between objective and function that does not quite fit.
At this point, family and friends may make a marginal retreat, as they accept that I have succumbed to the grip of an intense curiosity. Or perhaps they will advance and try to shock me back into their world. Sometimes it works. My usual response is: “I’ll just make a note.” Out comes FieldKit, my aptly named mobile phone with stylus; and I am writing, dictating, or tapping away. Sometimes in OneNote, more often on one of my publicly visible surfaces such as The Essayist’s Notebook. Sometimes I may just take a photograph. But thought captured, I may relax. Gestation has begun.
The falling apple
The next time I am alone, the apple continues its journey towards the world and my thoughts begin pulling at the available threads. This is not a curiosity for resolution, but one that seeks a clarity of comprehension. What is going on? What is this connected to? What other relationships might be revealed if I stay with it? The movement of thought is underway. What do I already know? What do I currently think? How does this new observation connect? New juxtapositions and relational boundaries may be revealed.
More threads to pull upon: the road junction might lead to questions about infrastructure and the way people move through places. Those questions might lead to decisions in governance, a query about priorities, the shape of public spending, and the structures that influence what gets done.
I don’t know where the inquiry will lead when I begin. But I do have choices. More than one question may emerge. Most recently, a single thought led me towards two different perspectives: one about vision, another about imagination. I wrote two short essays. Only later did I feel I had arrived at a sufficient understanding to construct a single essay from the two examples of exploration. The movement is not necessarily a straight line.
Honesty
At the outset, writing lets me capture some clarity about my observation: what I think it was that I perceived. Even such a simple act can reveal an unexpressed assumption, opinion, or discrimination hiding within my stance, my vantage, or my behaviour of attention.
Sometimes writing changes what I thought I was thinking. Sometimes another person’s response changes it again. I talk to my wife or a friend. More recently, I have begun to use AI, cautiously, as another way of sense-checking myself. Am I being reasonable? What might I have missed? Is there another way of seeing this
Even so, the act of writing remains the overall pursuit of clarity and focus. Throughout the inquiry I try to remain attentive to the three honesties. Self-deception is an easy trap to fall into. Assumptions connect together like Lego bricks and, without realising it, I may have constructed a stance, defined a perception, or rationalised my attention. Being in this disposition is not always comfortable. Some of what I have explored has been stressful and distressing. The curiosity can become intense. I am not merely prepared for my understanding to change. I have come to expect it.
Action
Our lives are framed in action. So refusing to advocate for specific action may seem to be a strange restraint. But one must see it within the ambition for the essay, which lies within a wider ambition for democracy. Frequently, the very decisions for action are bounded by asymmetry. Someone usually has more power to define the question. To define the terms. To decide what is relevant. To determine the sequence in which things are presented. And sometimes, most importantly, to determine what appears to be possible. And if you don’t know that another possibility exists, you can’t choose it.
Therein lies the ambition of the essay. Not to advocate for an answer but to describe the landscape for the decision and reveal the possibilities for action.
The Essay
The essay is where I choose a route through the terrain I have explored. I might have followed many paths in remaining there. I may have explored a thought from several perspectives, discovered relationships that were not visible at the beginning, rejected some possibilities, and pursued others. But eventually I have to engage myself with a single thread.
Think of the job of the walking guide. They must explore the whole of the mountainside. Acknowledge the features that might be of interest, record the delights and dangers of the landscape, and prepare to present all of these to a group of walking companions by following a single thread and to make a walk on a particular day. The exploration of the mountainside and the chosen walking route are not the same thing. Nor is the route the mountain. But a competent guide will choose the route that may illustrate just one quality of the mountain, with clarity.
Something similar happens in the construction of an essay. The essay is a finished product, but it is only a single thread navigating the landscape of the thought. It may be beautifully crafted. It may display a perfect command of language. It may reach into the past or wonder about the future. But it remains a moment in time. Like the mountain walk taken during one day.
The thinking does not stop because the essay has been written. Nor does publication stop the movement. I share an essay because I hope it engages someone else in that movement. A reader may disagree with me. They may extend what I have written, see a relationship I did not see, or begin an inquiry of their own.
The finish of the walk does not complete the mountain. The essay does not close the movement. But it offers a moment of it to another mind.
The Practice
I use three surfaces to capture the movement of an essay for myself.
The Essayist’s Notebook captures the moment when something catches my attention. I record it and the initial reflection begins. It may be no more than a fragment. But I might achieve some initial clarity, I might realize I am asking more than one question, or that I’ve pursued this particular enquiry before. Or allow me to begin to describe a tension I am sensing somewhere.
The Essayist gives me space to observe myself and analyse. How do I pursue an inquiry? What drives it as it develops? What things occur to me about the execution of the craft?
The Essay is a snapshot in time of the thread of thought I seek to unfold in a way that may be shared with my companion, you, the reader. To say: “This is where I stand. This is what I can see from here. Please let me share it with you.”
So yes, writing is the way I convey all of this. But I hope I have shown that it is only a part, a fragment, of the process, the practice, the disposition, and the craft. This is what I mean when I say that the practice is being in the disposition. It is a way of being in the world: attentive to what catches my mind, driven by curiosity, willing to follow where it leads, prepared and expecting, to have my understanding changed.
Sometimes that understanding informs action. Sometimes it changes nothing beyond myself. Sometimes it becomes an essay. And sometimes it simply remains a note. But the movement continues, and essays emerge.
And sometimes stance advances and perception evolves.
Further information
- Stance: The Essayism.org Manifesto: Revision as Epistemology
- Identity: https://dm.ie
- At Home: dm.ie
- Writer’s shingle: https://marshall.ie
The Essayist’s Notebook
The notebook is the least finished of the three publications.
It is a place for observations, fragments, working notes, and ideas that have not yet found their final shape. Some remain unfinished. Others develop into essays elsewhere. Many simply record a moment of attention before it disappears.
Readers looking for conclusions may not always find them here. Readers interested in process may find the notebook the most revealing of the three sites.
What to look for: beginnings, experiments, questions and provisional thoughts.
The Essayist
The Essayist explores essaying itself.
Here the subject is often the essay, the essayist, or the practice of inquiry through writing. Many of the pieces examine how essays work, what distinguishes them from other forms of writing, and how understanding emerges through observation, reflection and revision.
If the notebook records the raw material of essayism, The Essayist reflects on the craft and practice through which that material becomes writing.
What to look for: reflections on method, inquiry, attention and the essayist’s craft.
Essays
Essays is the principal publication.
The focus here is less on writing itself and more on the subjects that writing seeks to understand: society, culture, memory, public governance, the geometry of landscapes, and the shape of everyday life
The essays are not intended to provide definitive answers. They are attempts to clarify relationships, examine assumptions and bring overlooked aspects of experience into view.
Where The Essayist examines the practice, Essays puts that practice to work.
What to look for: reflective writing on society and the shape of life.
From here, the work opens outward toward
This page is a living surface. Last revised: October 2026