"The essay can do everything a poem can do, and everything a short story can do - everything but fake it. The elements in any nonfiction should be true not only artistically - the connections must hold at base and must be veracious, for that is the convention and the covenant between the nonfiction writer and his reader. veracity isn't much of a drawback to the writer; there's a lot of truth out there to work with. And veracity isn't much of a drawback to the reader. The real world arguably exerts a greater fascination on people than any fictional one; many people, at least, spend their whole lives there, apparently by choice. The essayist does what we do with our lives; the essayist thinks about actual things. He can make sense of them analytically or artistically. In either case he renders the real world coherent and meaningful, even if only bits of it, and even if that coherence and meaning reside only inside small texts." (Atwan 23-24) - Annie Dillard
So why did I choose Annie Dillard's essay, "Essays and the Real World," for this particular assignment? For one thing her opinion on what defines an essay is similar to mine. An essay does not have to be one of those uncreative, unimaginative, and downright boring 5 paragraph essays that we learned in the past. Essays do have limitations though. And that is that almost anything can be an essay, as long as it remains rooted in nonfiction. A fictional short story is not an essay. But as Dillard pointed out in her essay, nonfiction does not have to be boring for either the writer or the reader. The real world is full of interesting subjects or topics for both writing and reading an essay. A writer of fiction would weave a new world for the reader to explore but an essayist explores the real world. Just look at the current events going on around the world. We have the potential for another Cold War brewing after the whole Russia vs. Georgia war. India was just allowed to start using nuclear power, the same power we criticize the North Koreans for having. Those are just a few of the interesting events that are happening around the world and new events happen everyday. Just because you are writing about facts does not mean you can't be creative when you are writing. If a writer just displayed the facts straight up it would not be much of a piece of writing and would probably be downright boring to read. An essay can be almost anything, as long as it does not cross the boundary into fiction. Get creative.
