An Improvement in Quality is the Most Honest Path to Growth

Writing better essays.

This article is part of Literary Salon, issue #4.

An Improvement in Quality

In Wednesday’s newsletter, a new series began that explores how we can earn more readers by improving our non-fiction. I’ll include that mini essay We Must Write What’s Valuable below, after which, I’ll continue with new material.

But first, as I said in a recent note:

An improvement in quality is the most honest path to growth.

We Must Write What’s Valuable

Originally presented in Literary Salon #3.

The University of Chicago has a program that teaches academics how to write, not the students but the professors, and when you ask yourself what Story Club with George Saunders is doing that we’re not doing, it’s the same thing taught by the Chicago program. In his most recent post, answering a reader’s question about hope, Saunders follows the University of Chicago’s line of thinking. For all the good work that we do, for all the wonderful fiction and all the thoughtful essays we produce, if George Saunders and the University of Chicago are in agreement about what makes for good writing, maybe we should pay attention.

Saunders knows his readers. They write to him, and he knows the problems they’re interested in solving because they tell him. He addresses the problem by telling his readers what wonderful, smart people they are, and then he shows them the instability in their current situation and brings them out of that instability to a point of stability. As Sean Connery said in The Untouchables, that’s the Chicago Way.

“What an interesting question…” You’re so smart and clever.

“There are a few embedded assumptions in the question we might want to unpack a little.” There’s an instability in your thinking.

That’s Saunders demonstrating that his writing is valuable. He identifies a problem that’s important to his readers, and he sets about to change how his readers think about that problem.

To determine if this instruction for academics has any value for Substack essayists, especially those whose focus is fiction and literature, I looked up the most successful literature Substacks, chose one, and went to the most recent post.

What is George Saunders doing that we’re not doing?

He’s not writing to share his thoughts. As the program’s director, Larry McEnerney says, your teachers were paid to care about what’s in your head. They taught you to write to reveal your thinking so they’d know you understood the material and could grade you accordingly. That instruction was helpful to them but deadly to your ability to write with power.

If you’re really good, you’ll hype the cost.

Larry McEnerney

If we don’t learn the difference between what we write and what the masters of the craft write, we’ll always struggle for readers, because we’re fishing with bad bait. You can’t hook a reader with bad bait. List your hopes, dreams, and all your reasons for being here. Name them. Every single one begins with hooking a reader.

Readers care about what’s important to them, and when you present a fault in their thinking and back it up with an argument, now you have more than their interest. You’re making an impact.

We’re going to make a bigger impact on more people, starting today.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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The Most Honest Path to Growth

Yes, you’ve practiced your fiction until it’s perfect, but that hasn’t translated into your non-fiction. What’s the difference between what you write and those essays that have people falling over one another to read them? Larry McEnerney knows.

Your entire school career, you wrote for an audience that was paid to read your writing and who used your writing to judge your knowledge of a subject. None of that means anything when you’re no longer a student. Instead of paying to be read, you want to be paid, and your reader doesn’t care what you know. They have their own problems, and valuable writing addresses the reader’s need.

The good news is that McEnerney’s program for academics makes me believe that with a few minor adjustments, we can take our current writing and make it valuable.

McEnerney’s clients are experts in the subjects they write about, and for most of them, writing is part of the thinking process. When they’re done, they have a thoroughly considered point, but they haven’t yet created something their readers will understand is valuable. That’s where the Chicago way comes in: the flattery, the problem, and the argument; but in academia, these points aren’t obvious like they would be in ad copy. With our essays, we can apply McEnerney’s concepts and preserve the fundamental nature of how we write.

We can, that is, unless you’re following the rules you learned in high school. We’re throwing all that out the window.

Thesis statements? Forget about it. Tell your reader what your essay is going to be about? Nonsense. Useless. Detrimental.

When you tell what your essay is going to be about, you’ve already excluded the reader. You’ve not made it about them but about yourself and your precious writing.

When you tell what your essay is going to be about, you’ve already excluded the reader. You don’t open with a thesis statement but by revealing the reader’s problem.

Let’s look at the opening of the first essay I wrote on prose style and see what can be done to apply this strategy:

In this newsletter, you can find stories where I’ve had to mimic the styles of other writers. This includes the serials The Last Temptation of Winnie the Pooh and Kraken in a Coffee Cup, the latter of which is largely made up of shuffled passages from Moby Dick and tells the tale of a ship that sails beneath the seas, claiming the souls of drowned sailors. One key factor in making these projects work is mirroring the original author’s style, but that’s not the only reason such an exercise in style is useful. In studying their style, we learn to expand our own.

Now, by my standards at the time, this was a very successful essay. It launched a series and changed my entire experience of Substack. I’m thankful for what this writing did for me, but to get to where I want to be, I have to do better.

If I look at this paragraph through McEnerney’s lens, it’s a mess. I’m obsessed with myself, and it’s not until the final sentence that there’s a hint of the reader. Today, I might lead with that sentence:

In studying the style of the classics, we learn to expand our own. As a writer, you’re well read. You’re current with contemporary fiction, but it’s heavily flavored your voice, and you’re wondering how the works of the world’s great writers might teach you some of the old magic that today’s writers forgot. In my writing, I’ve often had to mimic the styles of the classics. This includes…

The flattery: you’re well read.

The problem: today’s writers, of which you’re one, have forgotten that old magic.

The argument: I’ve often had to mimic the styles of the classics, and because of that, I have the answer to your problem.

You’ll notice that none of this is over-the-top, and some of it is only suggested. I didn’t have to rewrite the whole essay, either, but I approached it with the reader in mind. I showed them the value.

To challenge this idea further, I returned to George Saunders, but his work is mostly pay-walled. I then searched for great essays on literature, and at the top of a short list was On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth by Thomas De Quincey.

His first short paragraph describes his emotional experience and confusion over the knocking at the gate. Then, the following opens his second paragraph:

Here I pause for one moment, to exhort the reader never to pay any attention to his understanding, when it stands in opposition to any other faculty of his mind. The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind, and the most to be distrusted; and yet the great majority of people trust to nothing else, which may do for ordinary life, but not for philosophical purposes.

Problem: your understanding gets in the way of grasping truth and reality and therefore, you have failed to embrace this moment in Shakespeare’s play. (For his reader, the failure to grasp an aspect of Macbeth is a serious problem, indeed.)

Argument: this passage is followed with the example of how we fail to draw perspective (unless we’ve been trained) because we draw from our understanding instead of what we see.

The essay was first published in the October 1823 edition of The London Magazine, and aside from the lack of flattery, it follows McEnerney’s points.

Not Every Popular Essay Clearly Follows This Vision

When they don’t, I do find myself struggling more with the question of why am I reading this? If a reader can’t answer that question, they stop reading. Sometimes, the reason for reading is simply the parasocial relationship they’ve built with the author.

Sometimes, however, just because the vision isn’t clearly present, doesn’t mean most of the elements aren’t there. They aren’t clearly present in the academic articles they create, unless you know what you’re looking for.

Perhaps you remember the Elysian article No One Buys Books that went viral. I do—and it’s surprisingly hard to remember and find posts that went viral, which I very much want to do for this series! I returned to the article to examine it through this lens.

Again, no flattery. The less your essay’s beginning openly confronts the thinking of your reader, the less necessary this becomes, I suppose. Otherwise, it works like an open-faced compliment sandwich.

The problem is buried, but I think I know why. This is the context of the article: Publishers attempted to merge, but the government brought an antitrust case against them, and this is what we learned because of it. Her readers are going to be writers hoping to break into the business, struggling published authors, and readers. Those are vastly different populations, and the problems this article addresses for each of them are not the same.

The one place the problem is most clearly stated is in the title. No One Buys Books. The article is the argument behind the title.

There Will Be Other Ways

Solving the reader's problem isn't a universal model. For me, the biggest points are:

1. school messed up your writing, and

2. focus on what interests the reader.

The problem-solving essay is one approach to that focus, but it won't be the only one.

We’ll focus on focus in the next essay.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Lessons on Prose Style, Literary Theory for Fiction and Non-Fiction, and Literary Analysis