So You’re Writing an Essay. But What Is It Really About?

I am incredibly bad at talking about my own work. When I’m at a party and someone asks what I’m currently writing, I get cagey and change the subject as quickly as possible.

The question of “aboutness” has always been difficult for me. Good essays—or any narrative prose—are never about one thing. But, in order to find focus in revision and hone the ideas enough to write both a good essay and cohesive pitch, I’ve learned that I need a system to organize my thoughts. I am a “dump the Legos out” writer, where I have to put everything that could possibly be in the draft on the page, then figure out what I can build with what’s there.

To get from a pile of ideas to one essay, I ask myself three questions: What is this essay about? What’s it really about? What is it really, really about?

I poached this framework from Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Elizabeth Weil. Brodesser-Akner was on tour for Fleishman Is in Trouble and already famous for her profiles and assorted journalism. The audience was full of women who wanted to be her. Many of the questions she got weren’t about the novel at all, but about her journalism and the path to $4 a word.

She and Weil joked about how they would ask each other three critical questions to get at the heart of a piece: What’s it about? No, what’s it really about? No, what’s it really, really about?

I wrote that in my notebook, underlined it three times, and clung to it like a life raft. I tell the origin story to both give credit where credit is due and to indicate where I ran with the concept—in case everything that comes after this paragraph is not what they meant at all.

I like this framework because it’s intuitive—you could ignore the rest of this essay, taking only the three questions, and get somewhere with them—and because it forces a specific type of thinking about your work. To answer them, you must think of your essay as a layered, complete thing: what you’re trying to achieve with the piece and whether you’ve done it. It is a gentle, persistent pressure to go deeper.

The first question, “What is it about?” is the topic or narrative action. You can think about it as the simple plot, or what happens in the story. In my experience, this is usually what people are asking at parties. Even in early drafts, most writers can answer this initial question.

The second question, “What is it really about?” is the narrative momentum. What are the tension and stakes that drive the story forward? By this, I do not mean drama or suspense, but rather the thing that’s going to keep the reader engaged through the end of the piece. This can also be referred to as the “engine” of the story.

The final question, “What is it really, really about?” is the bigger theme or question the essay deals with. You may hear this referred to as the argument of the essay. For a lot of writers, the answer to this question for many pieces will fall into the same broader category—whatever the scab is they can’t stop picking at. (I know, it’s gross. Find me a metaphor that works better and I’ll stop using this one.)

You must think of your essay as a layered, complete thing: what you’re trying to achieve with the piece and whether you’ve done it.

It can be hard for writers to identify why their memoir piece doesn’t work when they can point to other memoirs or essays on the same topic or with similar structures, especially if it’s working at the sentence level. Typically, the answer falls somewhere between the second and third question. Without stakes and without tying to themes greater outside of the story itself, essays are less likely to transcend the the Dinner Table Problem or, more directly, get people to care.

At the level of the second question, one thing I often see that trips essayists up is the desire to tell the whole story. This impulse both drags down the pacing and sacrifices specificity in favor of summary. You should be able to succinctly articulate the core conflict and beginning-middle-end of your narrative arc (or, if you’re doing something unique with structure, what the conceit is and how it works to power the story). You don’t need to spell this out for your readers but rather to use the answer as guardrails to determine what is part of this story and what is not.

At the level of the third question, the essay might not make meaning of the thing that happened, or situate the personal narrative in any greater conversation. Sometimes, there’s emotional work to be done. Often, though, it’s a confidence problem. “Who am I to say something definitive about the human condition?” is the crux of the hesitation. To which I say, well, who is anybody? More practically, you can frame it in terms of how your experience changed your worldview—it doesn’t have to be prescriptive. Another way to get at this question, I’ve found, is to think about the work your essay is “in conversation” with. What are they really, really about? How does your essay engage with similar themes?

None of this is particularly groundbreaking. Of course you need a narrative arc, stakes, and greater meaning. But, there’s something powerful about answering those questions clearly and succinctly, in a “nonliterary” way. Abstracting the ideas away from the words on the page can bring clarity that’s hard to get when you’re working at the sentence level and can’t see the forest for the trees.

I use these questions across my writing process, but I find them particularly helpful when crafting a pitch and revising. It took me a lot of practice to get halfway decent at pitching, and this structure helped me get there. It layers the pitch in a way that reads clearly and logically, and it answers the primary questions a pitch needs to. When I’m pitching without having written a draft, it is also a good pressure test to make sure I’m pitching something I actually can—and want—to write.

In revision, I use these questions as a North Star. Before I started using them, I would write pitches for finished essays and realize what I was pitching was better and clearer than what I had on the page, and I would go back and revise in that direction. When I ask myself these questions earlier, I can get ahead of it and save a little time and frustration toward the end of the draft. If I don’t have answers, I know it’s a thinking problem, not a writing problem. (Yes, all writing is thinking, but it’s a problem I am more likely to solve when I’m out of the document and on a walk rather than in the middle of drafting.)

This framework is also a great tool to use in workshop. Previously, I’d run it as an exercise on the last day of class so students could use it to shape pitches for the essays they’d workshopped. Recently, though, I’ve been introducing it earlier and have been surprised to hear students asking each other what their “what is it abouts” were in regards to submitted essays. They used the answers to reflect back what they were reading versus what the author’s intention was, which allowed the class to think through and address problems together. Ultimately, the questions helped shift the focus toward the author’s goals and vision for the piece and away from individual tastes and opinions.

Whatever way you choose to interrogate these questions, I urge you to actually answer them: to write them out longhand and not assume you already know. There can be obvious frustration in not knowing but also real solidity, sometimes even surprise and joy, in figuring out what you’re really, really trying to say.

• 0