The Essayist's Secret

The best essayists don’t agree on much. Chesterton was paradoxical.Chesterton once said “the purpose of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” He distrusted open-mindedness as a pose that avoided commitment. Hemingway was stark.Hemingway’s starkness comes from his journalism training at the Kansas City Star, whose style sheet gave him four rules he kept for life: use short sentences, use short first paragraphs, use vigorous English, be positive not negative. His fiction stripped away adjectives, adverbs, and authorial commentary until only action and dialogue remained. Orwell was ascetic.Orwell wrote that “good prose is like a window pane.” He’d rewrite a single paragraph six times until it achieved that clarity. His six rules include gems like “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” But they all converge on one fundamental principle: writing is a severe test of your ideas.

Montaigne first called the essay an “attempt.”Montaigne’s word “essai” meant a trial or attempt. He wasn’t declaring truths — he was testing them on himself. The essay form was born from the idea that the writer doesn’t arrive with answers, but discovers them through writing. Hemingway said to write one true sentence. They knew that a vague feeling isn’t knowledge until you wrestle it into precise words.

Most people focus on the surface rules: short words, active voice, cut the fat. These are just the sanitation code. The real secret is the willingness to not know what you think until you have written it, then to read it as a stranger, to cut what is dishonest, then to do it again.This is Paul Graham’s observation: “A good writer doesn’t just think, and then write down what he thought, as a sort of transcript. A good writer will almost always discover new things in the process of writing.”

This honesty is what produces the voice. Hitchens wrote like he talked because he had thought the matter through.Hitchens’ prose was conversational because he wrote the way he spoke: he’d found his voice by believing what he said. He never used a word in writing that he wouldn’t use in speech — which is rarer than you’d think among essayists. Orwell wrote plain sentences because he hated the lies of jargon.Orwell’s hatred of jargon was political, not aesthetic. He identified four vices that corrupt prose: dying metaphors, verbal false limbs (“render inoperative” instead of “break”), pretentious diction, and meaningless words. Each one, he argued, makes it easier to say nothing while sounding important. Hemingway’s iceberg depends on trusting the reader to feel what is left unsaid.Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” holds that the dignity of movement of an iceberg comes from only one-eighth being above water. A story’s underlying emotion should stay hidden beneath the surface, communicated through concrete details rather than explicit statements. The writer who explains everything destroys the reader’s trust.

You cannot phone in this temperament. But you can build it. One true sentence at a time.