Essayists blend these components in different ratios, like spirits in a cocktail. When I’ve asked authors and students to describe their writing processes, many said they refrain from deciding how an essay might employ those first three cocktail ingredients until they’ve mucked through the drafting a bit, because so much can be discovered in the actual making of a piece. The creative act, then, becomes essential to knowing what form an essay might take, what scenic stories it might tell, or how it might think or comment.
I’ve noticed, however, that we often don’t put the same processed-based expectations on the fourth key ingredient: research. It’s also rarer to hear advice about letting research drive your composition process in textbooks, conferences, and classrooms. Only after the creative groundwork is laid for an essay might we stack a finite set of books on the desk to get whatever cold, hard answers are needed. It’s also not uncommon to conduct all the required research at the beginning of a project and then push those books to the side. When viewed from these vantages, research is merely an opportunity to report and recount—two static responsibilities that consider answers more than openness. I suspect that such a mindset sparks a suspicion, aversion, or even fear of research in some writers. The reason I have this hunch is that folks come up to me and say things like, "Oh my god, you use so much research in your work; did you go to school for it? Are you a librarian or something? I could never do that!"
For me, research is the tool I use to get my imagination going, as well as to keep it running. I believe research is my ultimate creative act, more than making scenes or playing with forms or describing my thoughts. I should probably define creative research before I go further. I’m talking about any documented content that exists outside the self: books and articles and interviews, of course, but also works of art and popular culture, guided travel, archival footage, even Reddit posts. Anything, really, that might introduce a kind of external accountability to the text and further your understanding of your project can be, from a creative perspective, research. What is it about researching that is so generative to me? What does it feel like to research with openness and intuition? To answer those questions, I now present to you several paragraphs with absolutely no research in them.
Research is my ultimate creative act, more than making scenes or playing with forms or describing my thoughts.
My husband and I once took a vacation to Yellowstone. This is very unlike us, but we had recently moved out West, and I heard a rumor that you got evicted if you didn’t do at least one outdoorsy thing each year. Once in the park, we drove past a trailhead with a sign that read POINT SUBLIME ONE MILE. That sounds like something we should see, I told David—Point Sublime! A mile didn’t seem like we’d be venturing far enough into the wilderness to risk life and limb, either, so we got out of the car.
We found ourselves on a hilly trail that wound along this gigantic canyon, and since we’re not outdoorsy people, we lost our sense of what a mile felt like in the unfamiliar terrain. I knew that on the treadmill, a mile takes fifteen minutes. But after what felt like half that time, we came upon this lovely break in the trees where we could look across the canyon and see hawks and vultures flying between it. David started singing a Bob Seeger song. Was this Point Sublime? I wondered. No, we haven’t been walking long enough. We kept going, and a few minutes later we came upon this steep drop in the trail—the kind that makes your stomach lurch at the sight of it. Maybe this is Point Sublime, I considered, but it’s, like, the negative sublime? Once again, we weren’t sure, and so we headed back onto the path. The trees seemed to be growing taller, and I stopped to watch two fighting squirrels scurry around a massive trunk, but when I got a closer look I saw that they were…beginning an amorous exchange. By then, we’d been walking for what felt like hours (it was probably only twenty minutes), and I began wondering if I loved David enough to stop myself from eating him when the sun set. I was convinced we’d missed Point Sublime altogether and were now trespassing on Sasquatch’s home turf, and that’s when we came upon a small clifftop bordered by a few railroad ties, one of which had a crooked wooden sign nailed to it that read Point Sublime. The view was pretty good, I guess.
That view wasn’t the major takeaway of our hike; not by a longshot. What mattered was what I learned about sublimity and about my personal sense of time. I was able to map my interest: to see what keeps me walking and what forces me to stop, and for how long. In short, the hike taught me about my own attention. It also taught me the feeling of vertigo and how squirrels make sweet love.
This mirrors how I set up a creative research process. I first make some kind of research goal, an artifact or a document that I’d like to find. That gets me out to of my “car” and sends me “walking.” I move through sources in an un-regimented way, working toward a prescribed answer but making sure to stop whenever I’m moved to linger. When the “walk” is over and I’ve reached that original destination, the tangents I’ve made along the way have proved much more fruitful than the original task, and my writing focuses on them more than that first mission. The things I discover on the “hike” reveal more about me as an artist than the surface level—or stated—research question at the beginning. This is how research can power a creative inquiry.
An example: I knew I wanted to write an essay on pigeons for my book about famous animals. The research that got me started was the tale of Nicola Tesla bonding with a New York City pigeon, which he documented caring for in its final hours. I imagined a piece that ended with the sad image of a pigeon dying in Tesla’s shaky, septuagenarian hands. To get to that story, I found myself reading Tesla biographies and Gilded Age books about urban birds. To understand the bird that fascinated Tesla, I consulted biological texts and homing pigeon training manuals.
Along the way, I recorded my discoveries into a timeline of pigeons working with humans that would hopefully roll forward into the Tesla tale. Stops on that timeline included the ancient markets in Aleppo, the 1870 siege of Paris, and the U.S. Army’s “Lost Battalion,” which was saved by a carrier pigeon named Cher Ami (her taxidermized body is on display at the Smithsonian). As I dug deeper, I noticed that the use of pigeons in brutal human situations—war, fights, political takeovers— was where my interest kept landing, and so I ultimately took the essay in that direction. Poor Nicola Tesla and my half-filled notebook about him were erased from the piece…though I repurposed a bunch of that research in a later essay on elephants and electricity.
Researching the Point Sublime way is messy and meandering by design. You often feel ill-outfitted, and you rarely think you’re on the right track. These descriptors—unprepared, peripatetic, lost—don’t match the assumed formal rigor that many use to define responsible research situations (especially if you had to write term papers in high school). But in my experience, creative research cannot thrive if it’s shoved inside a tight space or if it ignores the proclivities of the mind that are required to make the artistic journey.
So, how do you take a Point Sublime hike in the first place? Here are a few tips on getting braver and wilder with your research inquiries. Tip #1 is to become acquainted with local research librarians, either at your university or your neighborhood’s public branch. A savvy librarian is so helpful with even the weirdest queries—did anybody ever record the name of the pigeon that died in Nicola Tesla’s hands?—that I suspect they are magicians rather than mere mortals at a reference desk.
Tip #2 is to research without initial judgement (within reason, that is). When I’m on a research bender, I of course seek out traditional books, documentary films, newspaper databases, and academic articles. I even commit the criminal act of consulting Wikipedia almost every day—not as a main source, but to give overviews of new subjects I come across. And you can find some gold nuggets in the source links at the bottom of a Wikipedia page. Sometimes the links send you to unhinged Geocites pages that look like the 1996 Space Jam website, but you quickly learn how to discount the duds.
Consider a mix of hard and soft sources to offer a broad perspective of your topic. Track the way it’s been documented and discussed by multiple communities. For my war pigeon essay, I used government summaries of the Army’s Lost Battalion, books written for popular audiences of the era, New York Times reports of hero pigeons during several American conflicts, and catalogued artifacts (like telegrams and journal entries) from battlefields. I went to the Smithsonian to wave at Cher Ami in her plexiglass case. I found a 2012 YouTube clip of citizens in the Syrian city of Bab Amr sending messages to allies via carrier pigeons (then I had to find someone who spoke Arabic to translate).
Tip #3 is to engage in self-education as a part of your research. I’ve taken MOOCs (Massive Online Courses) on music theory and learned about equestrian sports by watching instructional “helmet cam” videos. I’ve contacted experts for informational interviews (where I ask a lot of stupid questions….creative researchers must be unafraid of stupid questions!), and I’ve tried to learn racquetball and the Screamo singing style (what better way to internalize research than getting it inside your body?).
Opening your research window so wide means you get the breeze of inspiring facts, but you also get the bugs and pollen and anything else that wants to fly, like wayward pigeons, into your project. This makes it an awfully time-consuming process. Sometimes I’ll go to the library for a title and check out an entire shelf of books, knowing that I’ll spend a weekend picking through them to find the one tidbit that will matter when the piece is said and done. Or—even worse!—said tidbit just sends me back to the library with further questions. This time-consuming practice is hell on the social life, and it’s sedentary, too. That’s why Tip #4 is to develop a spinal stretching regimen to avoid costly chiropractic bills.
After this messy process concludes comes the fact checking. A sprawling, uncontained research process that spans months (or years) across multiple mediums makes for some painful accountability once the essay is in the can. My system of notetaking is intuitive and self-indulgent; I like to take notes in whatever shape or format seems to match my nebulous curiosity, because sometimes even my notetaking style can give me ideas (usually for the shape of a piece). I use large sheets of artist’s paper, a network of journals, and at least three models of Post-it. Have you ever seen the meme of Charlie from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia leering in front of a bulletin board covered in paper scraps and newsprint and yarn? C’est moi.
I try to leave breadcrumbs of sources and page numbers in my notes, but this intuitive annotation plus the breadth of texts—books, web articles, videos, random WWI maps bound in leather folios discovered on a library’s basement shelf—would defy any digitized tracking system. It’s beyond tedious to backtrack and find the sources of whatever content makes it to my end draft, but I accept that back-end misery so that I can keep my initial researching swift and inspired. More important than a clean and deliberate research method is a clean line to the resonance that you experience when taking these wandering walks through myriad sources. That’s what keeps your research creative, and that’s what keeps you searching for the beating heart of your piece. I think the benefits of wide and intuitive research far outweigh the challenges.
Once you’ve found yourself on a satisfying research hike, what might you do with all the things you’re discovering? Let’s look back to when I first listed research as one of four key components to essaying, along with scene, commentary, and form. Those other three cocktail ingredients can get more vivid—more creative—with the help of a wild research process. Here are a few examples.
More important than a clean and deliberate research method is a clean line to the resonance that you experience when taking these wandering walks through myriad sources.
Even the research-averse know that external sources help a writer build scene. Stories, as we all understand, work well when situated in a time and place. For my own essayistic world building, I’ll read period magazines or films. I love looking at maps and reading novels from that era. What am I looking for? Details, for starters. I once wrote an essay about Mozart and his pet starling, and to build the maestro on the page, I kept a list in my notes of reports from his contemporaries about how he moved through the world. He whistled, he wore a garnet cape and carried a fancy cane, he preferred to take his dinner after 10pm.
Another thing I hunt for is jargon from the era, industry, or community where I’ve placed the story. In musical discussions, I learned quarter notes are sometimes called “crotchets” and a memorable run of notes in Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik is categorized as a “Mannheim rocket.” What a term! I also look for boundaries or places where my own descriptive lexicon won’t apply. In 18th century Vienna, the instrument in Mozart’s apartment would have been called a fortepiano and not a pianoforte, for example, so I had to change my language. Also—and I love this correction—because the black and white keys of the instrument were reversed back then, it would make more sense to describe Mozart’s playing as “tickling the ebonies.”
Finally, I turn to research to write the scenes themselves… research as autopilot! One centuries-old biography quoted a visitor to the Mozart household. He watched the composer burst from his dressing area into the parlor. Mozart’s hairdresser followed closely behind, still working on the maestro’s coif. He was holding the braids while Mozart beelined to the piano, like a man trying to steer a runaway horse. How could I not make this a scene to depict Mozart’s idiosyncratic verve?
The best essays sport a form that was built in direct response to its content. The structure of a piece should be in conversation with what you’ve learned and how you’re thinking. Some of the essays I feel most confident about were shaped, on the page, by a research discovery. For the Mozart essay, I found myself researching both Classical music theory and songbird learning patterns. Looking through my notes, I saw that both starling song and Mozart’s sonata form were four-part structures. Mozart’s symphonies and sonatas moved from exposition to development to recapitulation to finale, while male starlings sing a pattern of whistling, warbling, clicking, and screeching. That overlap connected the two main characters of my essay. It also gave me a framework—four sonically different parts—that became the essay’s form.
There’s plenty more to mine, structurally, in the sources you peruse. Importing a source with a noteworthy form—like a musical score or a ship’s manifest—signals a shift toward the real, especially if the form is something readers recognize. Imported forms can bring a visual representation of whatever researched material is driving your essay. If you’re the kind of person who likes a little bit of a framework to guide you while you’re writing, keep a log of various forms you encounter during research. You never know what will spark a structural idea.
Sometimes the source flat-out commands how the piece will appear. When I was writing about the famous “My Cat Jeoffry” verses from Christopher Smart’s poem Jubilate Agno, I read (and consulted a scholar to confirm) that we only have half of this beloved poem, and all seventy-five lines of “My Cat Jeoffry" are missing the corresponding verses that originally ran along the left side. I’d been trying to figure out how an essay about “Jeoffry” would function, and when I learned this, I knew the piece must take the form of those seventy-five lost, left-hand lines.
Many personal essayists who are in the middle of a project worry that their readers won’t stay interested in their lived experiences (Who’s gonna care that I had this sad break-up?) The writer wants their thoughts and feelings, their interiority or analytical commentary, to resonate with readers. This is why many personal essays move beyond internal experiences and reach out to some parallel story from our shared world.
If you’re unsure of the impact of the story you’re telling, you might try bringing in another thread of related or complementary researched content. Pair your experience with a famous person’s life, an animal’s life, a biological process, a famous painting. Doing this lets the reader know their world is a part of your thoughts and thus, they are in your artistic thought process, too. An example of this technique that really grills my cheese is Melissa Faliveno’s essay “The Finger of God,” which explores the author’s fear of tornadoes and her upbringing in the Midwest. Rather than focusing solely on that fear and her own stories, Faliveno visited a neighboring town that was rocked by a F5 in 1984. She interviewed its citizens about the event, and then, with generosity and care, included their stories alongside her own to the extent that these other folks overtook the essay. The result is a complex, and much more public-facing, articulation of a personal phobia.
Research can also help articulate difficult-to-express subject matter. Sometimes when we need to write our way through difficult (or just BIG) personal experiences, direct language is not enough (I can hear every poet reading this saying no duh). If you’re a prose writer who finds herself writing “words cannot describe what I felt,” research can help! Try locating a peripheral topic that, at its distance from you, is easier to write about. A thesis student once tried this after lamenting that her story of a break-up felt too difficult to depict. Everything I want to say feels like it's been written a hundred times before, she told me. She’d been researching oceanic creatures for some other project and learned about the tenacity of barnacles: the way they grow and cling and die when separated from their hosts. Bingo, she thought, and poured all her emotional storytelling into reporting details of these filter-feeders. The essay she finished was complex, intelligent, and emotionally vivid.
OK, this was a long trek (who knows if we’ve hiked one mile or six?), and I didn’t even give you any amorous squirrels to watch along the way. I hope I’ve been able to show how—both on micro and macro levels—the sound, shape, and self of an essay can be enlivened with research. Here’s hoping you soon get out of your car and start your own winding research walk toward your Point Sublime. These wanderings make for a long, strange, and occasionally confusing trip, but for me it’s still the best way to get my writing to…well maybe not sublimity, but at least satisfaction.
