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          The Shape of the Essay Field

          June 2025

          An essay has to tell people something they don't already know.
          But there are three different reasons people might not know
          something, and they yield three very different kinds of
          essays.

          One reason people won't know something is if it's not
          important to know. That doesn't mean it will make a bad essay.
          For example, you might write a good essay about a particular
          model of car. Readers would learn something from it. It would
          add to their picture of the world. For a handful of readers it
          might even spur some kind of epiphany. But unless this is a
          very unusual car it's not critical for everyone to know about
          it. [1]

          If something isn't important to know, there's no answer to the
          question of why people don't know it. Not knowing random facts
          is the default. But if you're going to write about things that
          are important to know, you have to ask why your readers don't
          already know them. Is it because they're smart but
          inexperienced, or because they're obtuse?

          So the three reasons readers might not already know what you
          tell them are (a) that it's not important, (b) that they're
          obtuse, or (c) that they're inexperienced.

          The reason I did this breakdown was to get at the following
          fact, which might have seemed controversial if I'd led with
          it, but should be obvious now. If you're writing for smart
          people about important things, you're writing for the young.

          Or more precisely, that's where you'll have the most effect.
          Whatever you say should also be at least somewhat novel to
          you, however old you are. It's not an essay otherwise, because
          an essay is something you write to figure something out. But
          whatever you figure out will presumably be more of a surprise
          to younger readers than it is to you.

          There's a continuum of surprise. At one extreme, something you
          read can change your whole way of thinking. The Selfish Gene
          did this to me. It was like suddenly seeing the other
          interpretation of an ambiguous image: you can treat genes
          rather than organisms as the protagonists, and evolution
          becomes easier to understand when you do. At the other
          extreme, writing merely puts into words something readers were
          already thinking -- or thought they were.

          The impact of an essay is how much it changes readers'
          thinking multiplied by the importance of the topic. But it's
          hard to do well at both. It's hard to have big new ideas about
          important topics. So in practice there's a tradeoff: you can
          change readers' thinking a lot about moderately important
          things, or change it a little about very important ones. But
          with younger readers the tradeoff shifts. There's more room to
          change their thinking, so there's a bigger payoff for writing
          about important things.

          The tradeoff isn't a conscious one, at least not for me. It's
          more like a kind of gravitational field that writers work in.
          But every essayist works in it, whether they realize it or
          not.

          This seems obvious once you state it, but it took me a long
          time to understand. I knew I wanted to write for smart people
          about important topics. I noticed empirically that I seemed to
          be writing for the young. But it took me years to understand
          that the latter was an automatic consequence of the former. In
          fact I only really figured it out as I was writing this essay.

          Now that I know it, should I change anything? I don't think
          so. In fact seeing the shape of the field that writers work in
          has reminded me that I'm not optimizing for returns in it. I'm
          not trying to surprise readers of any particular age; I'm
          trying to surprise myself.

          The way I usually decide what to write about is by following
          curiosity. I notice something new and dig into it. It would
          probably be a mistake to change that. But seeing the shape of
          the essay field has set me thinking. What would surprise young
          readers? Which important things do people tend to learn late?
          Interesting question. I should think about that.







          Note

          [1] It's hard to write a really good essay about an
          unimportant topic, though, because a really good essayist will
          inevitably draw the topic into deeper waters. E. B. White
          could write an essay about how to boil potatoes that ended up
          being full of timeless wisdom. In which case, of course, it
          wouldn't really be about how to boil potatoes; that would just
          have been the starting point.



          Thanks to Jessica Livingston and Michael Nielsen for reading
          drafts of this.



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