Some pieces arrive knowing what they are. - Others arrive in disguise.
A little while ago I started writing about a pair of espadrilles. At least, that was what I thought I was writing about. The subject seemed slight enough. A pair of shoes. A memory. An anecdote.
But writing has a habit of refusing the boundaries we assign to it.
As I followed the thread, the piece became something else. The espadrilles remained, but they were no longer the subject. They had become a doorway into questions of identity, memory, place, absence, and change. What had begun as an observation turned into a discovery.
That experience reminded me of an important distinction. We often imagine that writing is the act of expressing what we already know. Yet some of the most rewarding writing does the opposite. We begin with one perception and finish with another. The act of writing becomes a means of finding out what we think.
The finished piece is here:
Essays: The Espadrilles
What makes this piece valuable to me is that I also wrote about the process surrounding it. Before finishing it, I found myself trying to understand why I was being drawn towards it in the first place:
The Essayist’s Notebook: First Notebook Essay
Then, after the story was complete, I wrote again, reflecting on what had happened and what the piece had revealed:
The Essayist’s Notebook: Second Notebook Essay
Taken together, the three pieces form a small constellation: the approach, the encounter, and the reflection afterwards. Perhaps that is what interests me most these days. Not simply the finished work, but the movement of thought that produces it. The path by which something apparently ordinary discloses an unexpected depth. Sometimes a pair of espadrilles is just a pair of espadrilles. And sometimes it turns out to be a way of seeing.
This is not the last time I will write about writing. My next post will introduce another piece whose origins lay in governance and public policy, but which ultimately emerged as a short story. It was an experiment in using narrative to explore how institutional decisions travel outward into the everyday experiences of ordinary people
David Marshall
Letter from an Essayist