The Digital Essay
In my announcement yesterday that I would no longer write in the third person, I mentioned that I wanted to start a new feature that would work much better with first person narrative.
The feature: The under 500-word essay.
I hope to write a lot of them and to develop a unique stylistic approach. Yes, I'm probably delusional. Writing is like pornography: it seems like everything has been done.
But here's my angle: Traditionally (like, more than ten years ago), essays ran thousands of words. The great essayist Joseph Epstein says that he thinks essays typically run anywhere from three to fifty pages. The great essayists--Bacon, Swift, S. Johnson, Hazlitt, Chesterton, Belloc, Mencken, and Orwell--wrote essays of such length.
By focusing my efforts on essays under 500 words, I escape their immense shadow and, in the process, give myself a shot at doing something new.
And I think it is new. Columns and op-eds today run anywhere from 550 to 1,000 words. My shortest published op-ed ran in The Detroit News: 600 words. The Detroit Free Press told me they don't want anything longer than 750 words. I've seen a few op-eds at 500 words, but no fewer.
So at fewer than 500 words, this is new.
Of course, this might also be junk. I'll see how it goes.
But I will insist that they be considered essays, despite their lack of endowment.
Essays are extremely flexible. To quote Epstein again, “The formlessness of this very old form is part of its pleasure.” There is, says the normally-conservative Epstein, no “standard essay: no set style, no set length, no set subject matter.” That's sweet. I will wield that authoritative relativism against all critics who say my little pieces aren't big enough to be essays.
Now, I need to name this genre. It's my idea (as far as I know), so I get to name it. That's part of the fun.
I once submitted a short story to a magazine, and the publisher told me it wasn't a short story. A short story, he explained is 5,000 to 20,000 words. At 1,000 words, my story was a “short short story.” That's cute and painfully accurate, but I refuse to call these essays “short shorts.”
I considered calling them “Musings,” but that's cute (and I hate cute). Plus, if I write only one of them, it'd be “a musing,” and that's no good.
I also considered calling them “lighting essays.” That sounds cool, and it captures the quick strike approach I'm attempting. But the word “lightning” also implies brilliance and, sigh, there's no guarantee of that.
I had settled on “bullet essay,” but a Yahoo! search showed that the same phrase is popular among educators. I ran so fast that I didn't even stop to figure out how they use it.
I've decided to call it the “Digital Essay.” “Digit” implies little, and the phrase captures the forum where these essays are meant to flourish: the Internet.
I don't know how many I'll write. In the middle of a three-day weekend and all seven children at their grandparents', I feel like I could write two or three a day. I know that won't be the case when Tuesday rolls around, but I hope to put up three or more every week.
Regular readers of TDE need not worry: This will not replace the regular fodder. I'll still put up eight to 15 posts every day, whether you want me to or not.
