Art Cuts Those Who Wield It
The truest essay I know.
If you missed the first essay in the series, I think it has something to say, and it’s a work I’m proud of. If you encountered the version that went out by email, I’ve been beside myself (with more grief than is reasonable) over what I perceive as a lack of quality. That irony absolutely ruined me—and it’s reflected in my approach to today’s follow up.
This time, I attempt to write:
The Truest Essay I Know
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Before we move on to other sources in the pursuit of perfecting the non-fiction art form, I want to return to Larry McEnerney and the construction of our sentences. He scoffs at our rules for active and passive voice and says, instead, that the sentence’s focus should be on the cares of the reader.
Art Cuts Those Who Wield It
Last time, we took as our example my first essay on prose style, and my newsletter was the focus in that original paragraph. Readers don’t care about my newsletter. They’re happy if my writing provides value, but they can find that value elsewhere. The newsletter is important to no one but me.1
In the rewrite, the focus became the reader.
That’s a fundamental failure of much of our non-fiction writing. We’re wrapped up in what’s important to us instead of what’s important to our readers.
Whatever your readers care about, whatever motivates them and holds their attention, that’s your focus. We absolutely write about what we care about! That’s where passion come from. The point of focus isn’t the subject matter but in how we present it, and we can present our passions with a focus on the interests of the reader.
When McEnerney talks about focus, he means sentence construction. Stress is placed upon the end of a sentence, indicating importance, but the focus of the sentence is its subject. When working with academics, he has them circle every subject and then asks if that’s what’s important to the reader.
Let’s apply that exercise to my writing:
Art cuts those who wield it, and as a fiction author, I reject essays as art in order to spare myself the pain. I publish too quickly in search of that serotonin high and too glibly out of a sense of obligation, and that which is not art is rendered garbage. If success matters, greatness must be the goal. My essays must become art.
Perhaps you and I are the same. If so, if you bleed over your fiction, then my first advice to us as essayists is that we must again be willing to bleed–both from the effort and from the cruelty of the truest sentence we know.
Soul gives life to our fiction, but I imagine that soul belongs to my characters and not my prose. It does not. Those paragraphs consist not of fingers and toes but of words, only words, and from those words a soul emerges.
It can live here as well, quickening every line, allowing them to dance and fly. The freedom of fiction feels foreign to the essay but only because of the lies school taught us. We no longer write for a teacher but for an audience who trusts us to bring value, not homework.
We are Frankenstein, come to give life to the lifeless. We are Duchamp, come to turn trash into art.
These words come from this essay, opening paragraphs written in this attempt to seek improvement, and I’m not sure if they turned out better or worse for the effort. I’ve cut them, leaving them only here, and would love your thoughts on the difference in style between these lines and those that remain.
In the first paragraph, some of that focus is on myself, and it's not until the second paragraph that I move that focus to the reader. I knowingly ignored that reality because in my first attempts, the subjects were the reader or a generalized abstraction. To write the truth and attempt to capture some of the spirit that exists in our fiction, I began instead with myself as the essay’s “protagonist”.
Otherwise, the focus of that first paragraph is art, greatness, and essays. The first two, at least, matter greatly to my readers, and my argument is the importance of the third.
For those of us who desire to improve, I thought that spoke to the heart.
And yet, I’ve been presented this counterpoint: maybe there’s nothing wrong with my essays. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with yours.
A friend reached out to me with kindness and advice, saying:
“Lemme guess. You’re at the point in your ADHD swing where you’re panicking about having scheduled too much, and so you’ve convinced yourself, again, that rigid discipline and hard lines are the solution to feeling like you’re drowning? And you’ve done this with the caveat that THIS time it will work because THIS time you really, really mean it? Am I in the ballpark?”
If we’re talking about my essays, I didn’t think that’s the issue. I just want to be better.
“I don’t think it’s your essay issue. I think it’s *your* issue. I think it’s why you keep ignoring pivot points in favor of ‘IT MUST BE HOW I FIRST IMAGINED OR I FAIL!!!’ It’s why the tone of your notes is subtly shifting from confident to frenetic.”
But… well… I…
Write the truest sentence you know.
That energy you saw might have been the promise of a new series blowing away the gathering mists of depression. The decision to improve our non-fiction hit me like I’d injected inspiration directly into my veins—which, in honor of the truest sentence, is probably that old one-more-thing-added-to-the-pile-will-be-the-answer syndrome.
It’s addictive.
Mental health moments aside, though, here’s a reality. I’ve seen those essays the heavy hitters post. My non-fiction work isn’t that good, but (dammit) we’re writers. We can do this. I just need to know how to get there.
I’ve come so far in the last year, and I’m not done yet.
So, what’s the solution? It might partially be Larry McEnerney. It might not be, but I believe in the power of the essay to bring us a larger audience; I believe that better quality helps bring a bigger audience. Finally, I believe that improvement takes time and effort.
Your essays aren’t garbage. My essays aren’t garbage, not even that last one that was posted too soon.
But they can be better. They will be better.
—Thaddeus Thomas
P.S. — I’ve returned to my mantra that “the one rule of Substack is that no one cares,” and I’ve decided it’s wrong. It was probably true for me back when I started saying it, but this community has been truly supportive.
Write the truest sentence you know.
By wrong, I mean it’s wrong to say. It gives the wrong idea, the wrong impression, and is likely more an exhibit of depression than anything else. The underlying concept underlying these words has merit—but I have True-Fan subscribers who took on the extra cost because they spent so much time working through my prose-technique archives that they felt they owed me.
That’s this thing right here:
Those readers have demonstrated that they care. Others demonstrate the same in other ways, and I dishonor all that through my lack of clarity.
I will find a better way to express my thoughts. Thank you for the love of this community. I don’t deserve you.
See my postscript.
Thank you for the wisdom! Solid insight and work. Keep the passion, shift the presentation. Now, back to essay 1, what are some essayist styles that one can study?