Non-fiction Writing
The Essay That Doesn't Know Where It's Going (And Why That's the Point)
The essay was invented as a form of thinking out loud, not reporting conclusions — and most of what gets called an essay today has forgotten this entirely.
The Idea
The word 'essay' comes from the French essai, meaning attempt. Montaigne, who more or less invented the personal essay in the 1580s, was explicit about this: he wasn't recording what he had already figured out. He was using the act of writing to figure it out. The essay was, for him, a technology for thought. This matters because it inverts the usual assumption about non-fiction writing — that you should know your argument before you begin, and that the writing is simply the delivery mechanism. That model produces a lot of clean, forgettable prose. It also produces a subtle kind of dishonesty, in which the writer performs certainty they don't actually possess. The essayistic tradition asks something different: that the writer follow genuine curiosity wherever it leads, including into contradiction, dead ends, and unresolved questions. The sentence 'I don't know' is not a failure; in the right hands it is the engine of the whole piece. What makes an essay compelling is not the destination but the quality of attention along the way — the specific detail noticed, the unexpected connection made, the moment when the writer surprises themselves. This is why the best non-fiction writing often feels more honest than fiction: not because it deals in facts, but because it deals in real uncertainty. The reader isn't watching someone explain a thing; they're watching someone genuinely wrestle with it.
In the World
James Baldwin's 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son contains a piece called 'Stranger in the Village,' written after Baldwin spent time in a small Swiss mountain town where the locals had never seen a Black person before. Children would run after him shouting. Adults stared openly. What Baldwin does with this experience is not what a lesser writer would do. He doesn't begin with a thesis about race in Europe, or arrive quickly at outrage, or offer a tidy sociological reading. Instead, he follows the experience with almost uncomfortable care — noticing, for instance, that the African carvings he sees in a Parisian museum are displayed as 'primitive,' while the same tradition runs through his own ancestral history. He moves from the personal to the historical to the philosophical without quite announcing each transition. The essay accumulates meaning the way a long conversation does, through accretion rather than argument. By the time Baldwin writes, near the end, that 'this world is white no longer, and it will never be white again,' the sentence has been earned through everything that preceded it — not asserted, but arrived at. What Baldwin is demonstrating, whether consciously or not, is exactly what Montaigne described: the essay as a form of inquiry. The conclusion doesn't feel like a conclusion because it feels like a discovery. You believe it not because Baldwin told you to, but because you watched him find it.
Why It Matters
If you write — or want to write — non-fiction of any kind, this distinction between delivering conclusions and performing inquiry is probably the most useful reframe you'll encounter. Most people learn to write by learning to argue: state your claim, support it, conclude. That structure is useful. But it tends to produce prose that feels finished before it begins, and readers sense this. The essay that already knows where it's going loses the reader's trust subtly but consistently. But even if you never write for an audience, there is something worth considering here about the relationship between writing and thinking. The specific act of following a sentence and seeing where it leads — not editing your thoughts before they reach the page, but discovering them in the act of writing — is genuinely different from thinking in your head. More honest, often. More surprising, sometimes. The question isn't whether you can produce a well-structured argument. The question is whether the writing contains any real risk — any moment where you didn't know, as you wrote it, exactly what you were going to say next.
A Question to Ponder
When you last wrote something — an email, a journal entry, a note to yourself — were you recording what you already knew, or were you finding out something you didn't?
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