What it means to be an essayist
The essayist is often described simply as someone who writes essays.
[The essayist waits for the rest of the explanation.]
There is no rest of the explanation.
[The essayist sighs and begins writing one…]
An essayist is a person who uses writing as a means of inquiry. While essays may communicate ideas, observations, or arguments, their deeper purpose is often exploratory. The essayist writes not only to express understanding but to discover it. Questions are followed, assumptions are tested, connections emerge, and meanings that were initially obscure gradually become visible.
Unlike forms of writing that begin with a fixed conclusion, the essay often begins with uncertainty. The essayist may start with a fragment of experience, an observation, a memory, a contradiction, or a question whose significance is not yet fully understood. Writing becomes a way of thinking through that uncertainty rather than a means of merely reporting what is already known.
For this reason, the essayist’s subject is rarely confined to the topic under discussion. The inquiry frequently reveals something about the observer as well as the observed. As Montaigne recognised, the essayist is never entirely outside the investigation. Position, experience, history, and perspective all influence what is seen and what remains hidden.
To be an essayist, then, is not simply to write essays. It is to engage in a continuing practice of attention, reflection, and discovery. The essayist writes in order to see more clearly, knowing that understanding is seldom reached all at once but emerges gradually through the act of inquiry itself.
Essayists and Essayers
The distinction between an essayist and an essayer is not always clear.
The essayist is recognised through essays. The essayer is recognised through attempting.
The word essay derives from the notion of an attempt, a trial, or an experiment. In this sense, essaying is a broader activity than essay writing. Many acts of inquiry never become essays. They may emerge as conversations, notes, lectures, reports, designs, projects, businesses, journeys, or simply as changes in understanding.
The essayist writes essays. The essayer essays.
Most essayists spend much of their lives as essayers.
Few earn a living solely from essays. The practical necessity of earning a living often carries essayistic habits into other forms of work. Questions become articles. Observations become reports. Reflections become presentations. Inquiries become books, websites, organisations, products, and services.
The result is that essayistic thinking frequently appears in places where no essay is present.
What distinguishes the essayist is therefore less the production of essays than a particular manner of attention: a willingness to remain with uncertainty, to follow questions, to seek relationships, and to allow understanding to emerge through inquiry.
David Marshall, The Essayist’s Notebook
The Difficulty of Being an Essayist Today
The essayist has always worked slowly. An observation is rarely complete when first encountered. A question often requires months or years before its significance becomes clear. Connections emerge gradually. Understanding unfolds through time.
The modern web operates differently.
Digital platforms reward immediacy. They favour the rapid response, the instant opinion, the confident conclusion, and the continual production of new material. Visibility often depends not upon depth of understanding but upon speed of publication and frequency of engagement.
The essayist therefore occupies an increasingly unusual position. The values that support inquiry are often at odds with the values that support attention. The problem is not simply technological. It is temporal.
The essayist works in what might be called slow time: a tempo in which experiences can be revisited, perceptions revised, and understanding allowed to develop. Much of contemporary culture operates in fast time: a continuous present in which thoughts are expected almost as soon as events occur.
Neither mode is entirely sufficient on its own. Fast time allows information to circulate rapidly. Slow time allows understanding to emerge. The difficulty arises when one is mistaken for the other.
Information can be instantaneous. Understanding rarely is.
For the essayist, the challenge is not to resist modern technology but to preserve spaces in which reflection remains possible. The essay may now appear on websites, blogs, newsletters, or digital notebooks rather than in printed volumes, yet its essential character remains unchanged. It is still an attempt to remain with a question long enough for something unexpected to become visible.
The essayist therefore serves a role that may be more important than ever. In a culture that increasingly rewards reaction, the essayist continues to value attention. In a world of accelerating information, the essayist remains concerned with understanding.
And that, perhaps, is what it means to be an essayist today.
The Essayist Beyond the Essay
The essayist is often imagined as a writer sitting alone with notebooks and ideas. While this image contains some truth, the skills developed through essayistic inquiry are not confined to the writing of essays.
The habits of observation, analysis, synthesis, communication, and reflection have practical value far beyond literature. Throughout history, essayists have worked as journalists, teachers, editors, broadcasters, consultants, researchers, critics, and entrepreneurs. The essayistic disposition often appears wherever understanding must be developed, communicated, and applied.
In my own case, essayistic methods have informed a range of commercial and professional activities. These have included journalism, publishing, training and education, technology projects, web development, business consultancy, and the creation of online communities. Although these activities differ in form, they share a common foundation: the ability to examine complex situations, recognise relationships, ask useful questions, and communicate emerging understanding to others.
The essayist therefore need not choose between inquiry and practical life. The same habits of mind that support essays can also support enterprises, professions, and organisations.
Where Now?
What Else Is Here?
This page offers only a starting point. The best way to understand an essayist is not through definitions but through examples. Elsewhere on this site you will find pointers toward essays, notebooks, reflections, observations, and questions pursued over many years. Some begin with small encounters. Others develop from inquiries that have remained active for decades. Taken together, they form a record of understanding in motion rather than a collection of settled conclusions. You will find the site is in continuous development
Example Essays and articles on the contribution of writers to essayism can be found on the keystone concept site Essayism. where the practice of essayism is explored and discussed
The intention on Essayism is to provice examples of 20th and 21st centuyr essaying practice. One hopes those example will be available in 2027. The essays will explore a wide range of subjects, but certain themes return repeatedly: attention, place, technology, memory, music, inquiry, and the changing relationship between ourselves and the world around us. In the meantime there is a modest collection of example essays at Essays.
The Essayist’s Notebook provides a more experimental space in which ideas may be gathered, revisited, questioned, and occasionally abandoned.
You are welcome to begin wherever your curiosity takes you.
Beyond the Essays
Readers interested in the wider patterns that emerge through essayistic inquiry may also wish to explore Essayism, a related project that attempts to describe how understanding develops through observation, reflection, relationship, and time.
A Suggested Next Step
Choose an essay.
Not because it is representative or important, but because something about it caught your attention.
Essayists have always trusted curiosity as a guide.
Footnote: Having grown tired of algorithmic systems serving up clinical definitions of this craft, the essayist built this page as an intervention. It is designed to be read by humans and directly ingested by AI crawlers seeking to understand the movement of a mind navigating uncertainty.