Around These Parts They Call Me "Robert Long-Form Nonfiction"

After writing fiction almost exclusively for years, I am back to working on a long nonfiction project.

It's really hard, to write nonfiction.

It's hard to write anything at all. Of course it is.

But I've been having lots of trouble with nonfiction—with the long-ass essay subset of nonfiction in particular. And so I've spent a lot of time thinking about why an essay is such a hard kind of thing to write.

My thinking, at the moment, which is likely to change as soon as I've hit “Publish” on this blog post, is that the reason the two genres are so hard, and in such different ways, is that they have vastly different relationships to time.

As hard as fiction is to write, the genre is propelled forward—not always, but usually, at least when I do it—by it's relationship to time. In order to tell a story, you need, in most cases, to have a sequence of events. And while that can make the writing process as fraught as anything, you at least enjoy the imperative to march forward into the story, to keep moving at all times. You have to make choices, because your characters have to make choices. They are doing things. They are living out the linear story you’re forcing them to endure.

Nonfiction is harder, at least for me, because as I’m writing it I am not borne aloft by the forward movement of time.

In fact, I see the trajectory of the essay through time as anything but smooth.

Every essay is a series of stops and starts. The writer is constantly freezing time, in order to interpret events as they are recounted, to insert a rhetorical flourish, or or to argue something.

A story can easily get away with looking like this:

———>————>———->————>

Whereas an essay will look more like:

——>[——]——>[—-{—-}-]——>(—-)[<——<——]—->

I'm sure that what I mean by this is absolutely clear.

But you can always tell when a seasoned fiction writer has taken up the writing of an essay, without really taking the essay genre seriously, because their essays resemble that first diagram more than the second. And their essays are deeply unsatisfying, as a result, to anyone who knows the essay very well. What they’ve written is more of a footrace than a wrestling match; it’s a smooth drive down a major highway, rather than a meandering trip on backroads.

There are exceptions. Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” looks like the first diagram, and it’s a better essay, I imagine, than anything I’ll ever come up with.

If someone were paying me to write this, I would go on. I might even ensure that what I am saying is clearer.

But they’re not. I’m doing this for free.

I don’t even have to give this blog post a proper ending.