Why I Am An Essayist

It hurts to not be read. But it hurts more to never have said what I thought was worth saying simply because I may never be read.

When I first began writing essays, one of the biggest obstacles I faced externally and internally was the pressure to write useful things. To give value to the reader. Someone actually did say that by musing, I was wasting my young life. Why? Because I was not writing what could fetch me money. Quickly, I settled the fact that I may not in my lifetime write things to ‘give value to the reader.’ Now, this does not mean that I will never write valuable things. It just means that I won’t be writing SEO or algorithm-assented materials or reader-prompted topics. As an essayist, I will write things I want to write and leave them for the readers to read if they are interested. I am an essayist; I have made my peace with that.

Commerce has killed writing as a creative endeavour. We have turned its creativity on its head. It has smothered the literary conscience. Most of the writing advice I knew and followed are odoriferous, and I should do more to discard them. I am an essayist.

It is commerce that asks you to write what people want to read. A writer knows that he wishes to write what he wants to read — an answer to his own question. But commerce, treating all writing as business (in the age of “content”), misinterpreted the very good advice that “write for the reader” which actually means “write with clarity so that the reader can understand what you are trying to say” to mean “write from the existing prompts what the reader wants answered.” It took egotism out of writing; when in fact egotism, is what makes good, valuable writing. The commercial writer himself is the ancestor of chatGPT — writing from reader prompts. A bullshitter. Like the software, they have an impoverished inner life; they do not have anything to say; they always wait for others to tell them what to say. That would not be a problem, of course, if they were doing this on their own and not trying to drag the entire world with them into a prompt-optimisation abyss. And because money is the measure of success, I trust people would look to them as the real writers. Hence, the advice and instruction they give on writing will by far be the most popular and most heeded. The only problem with that is when real writers decide to pick up the vocation, they will see that they are surrounded by commercial vultures who warp what writing is; and if the essayists are by no means strong in spirit, they would become commercial drones as well, losing their inner voice and waiting for the readers to prompt them with what to say. Now, I commend these people for doing good business — where writing is a means to them. But I am an essayist. Writing is the end for me.

When I read my favorite writers — essayists most of them — I do not expect them to give me value. Still, I expect to read something valuable. ‘What is the difference?’ you ask. The difference lies in the usage of those terms. The first, “give value”, is used in its current sense to mean give the reader what he needs. Answer his question. It is a search engine semantic reconstruction. A prompter type of value where I know what I need and I find the best person who can meet my need. So, I punch my question into the search engine and let the algorithm recommend what to read. The algorithm is the middleman. On the other side of the algorithm, the writer is also waiting for who he can offer value. He scours search engines and finds questions his potential readers are asking, and he answers them, meeting a need, and giving value. He knows that he is nothing without the reader. But to read something valuable is a different thing entirely. For instance, Harry Potter by J.K Rowlings is something valuable. But it does not follow that Miss Rowlings scoured Google and Bing to find something that the potential reader needs and then wrote the long Potter series on them. For what it is worth, we can safely assume that there was no potential audience. Or at least, that everyone was a potential audience. It was by the act of creation and creativity that Miss Rowlings called forth her audience. Harry Potter is valuable not because Ms. Rowlings was obsessed with giving value to a concrete set of persons or a belly-hungry search engine recommendation. It is valuable by the simple fact of being a good piece of creation. She followed the now derided “make it and they will come.” She made it and they came.

The common reprisal to this act of sheer creativity — “make it and they will come” — is that “readers are selfish; they don't care about you; they want what is in it for them” tethered with the “attention span is so sparse that no one has that time to verify if what you have to say is worth listening to.” I don’t know, sincerely, what this piece of advice is aimed at. It seems to me a subtle desire to dodge the egotism of writing; to appear selfless; to appear loving and problem-solving; to appear ready to ‘do it business’. But what it really is is the fear of dealing with nothingness and failure — knowing that no one may ever read what you write and that you may be wasting your precious time. Knowing that the true measure of your success is that you get read instead of executing something accurate to what your conscience demands. (Of course, what is literary conscience in the days of content marketing?). It seems to me to be the fear of not getting read but well cloaked in serious, success-grasping business language. It is egotism trying to dodge itself: “what is the point of writing if you are not going to get read? Why not simply write something that you are sure will be read because there is an existing demand for it?” It is, I am certain, a way of avoiding uncertainty — you wish to control all the cards so that there is no need to take risks. It is cowardice. And it in turn leads to emptiness; vanity; helplessness without the reader’s prompts. But I am an essayist; I write to talk; and I have made peace with the fact that I may never be listened to or read. It hurts to not be read. But it hurts more to never have said what I thought was worth saying simply because I may never be read. 

To give value and to be valuable are two things. Two different things. I know I have been given value when someone answers my questions. But I know I have read something valuable when I find more questions; things to make me pause and think; things to enrich my inner life; not solutions but problems to battle with. Yet, I leave delighted and sad. Delighted because I am richer, sad because I never want to leave. I know I have read something valuable when, rather than merely being grateful that my questions are answered, I am inspired to be creative and valuable. Every time I complete Albert Jay Nock’s writing, I am sad that it ended. But I am also eager to write my own piece — it is like he hands me a baton; I must carry on. Writing that gives value is different from valuable writing in the same sense that an instruction manual tells me how to use the microwave; but Hamlet, as all good literature ought to be, tells me who I am. Away from doling out factual pellets, a teacher is truly successful when his students nurse the desire to be like him. Our favorite teachers are not simply good at their subject matter; they inspire us. Such is the case when I read writers who without trying to give value, write valuable things. Because first, they are not faceless human-prompt bots. They are human beings who if I find something in their writing that answers my questions, it is because although unplanned and we have never met, we have a shared experience. This in fact decreases the tendency that they are phonies who test the moisture in the air to earn their pay as rainmakers (you ought to be careful of those who are nothing without your attention; they will mine it with no regard for your wellbeing). By the very fact that some of the people I read are in fact long dead and gone, it is more amazing that they share something so eerily similar to myself that I would never doubt their authenticity. But it does not end there. They often go all the way to leave me with more questions than I brought, leave me with a richer contemplative life, and give me a stature to aspire to. All without giving me a reason to weigh them and their writing based on the fatness of their bank accounts. Valuable writing differs from giving value when you read a piece and you can say — in the rather repulsive Gen Z term — “I feel seen.” That is why I am an essayist.

I would appreciate it if the writers who say writing is all about giving value — because readers are selfish — would come out and say it plainly that they are business people first and foremost. Otherwise, they are just cowards hiding behind cliches. It is an abomination to lump the richness of writers like Blaise Pascal, J.K Rowling, Albert Jay Nock, Nicholas Nassim Taleb, Hannah Arendt, Roger Scruton with the crassness of , the cheap self-help category. In other news, it is a spite on your readers if you cannot think of them as fully-fledged humans instead of pellet lovers and prompt suppliers. Where their attention is simply currency and not something to be cherished. No doubt that human beings are self-interested. But self-interest is not selfishness; thinking otherwise is to hold a damaging cynicism. It gives you the leeway to treat readers inhumanely — as pellet lovers only who cannot handle the real thing. But no surprises about pellets here. After all, some of us would rather feed on vitamin supplement pills than take time to eat real food. I guess pellet-eroticism affects all parts of our lives if we let it.

It all boils down to this: do you think what you have to say is worth saying without having an actual audience in mind to hear it? You can in fact write for the reader without becoming a chatbot by writing what you think is worth saying in all honesty and good conscience. Questions and answers in a strict, rigid sense happen between two chatbots — even though the chatbots may be human beings. But conversations, according to my favorite philosopher, Roger Scruton, “occur between beings who are rational and who are speaking freely.” No one condemned to reading from a prompt can engage in conversation. He is in that moment, neither a rational being nor speaking freely. He is an imitatio machina. Yet, the famed writing model of my day is the prompt type. I am not a prompt-reading writer. I am an essayist. Literature must be idiosyncratic.

Again, “write for the reader” means “write with clarity so that you can be understood.” Not “write only what the reader would have you write.” The first makes you a writer. The second makes you a court scribe.