About These Essays

An Essay Is Rarely Just about a Dog

Stories May Begin Innocently Enough but They Are Usually up to Something

By GUY D. JOHNSON
JUNE 8, 2021

My intent with this website is to share glimpses of life that may be of universal relevance and appeal. These pieces of writing are, for the most part, descriptive essays, a type of writing that falls within the broader category of creative nonfiction; so they are true stories, creatively told.

A story worth reading is not merely about the highlights of someone’s day. An essay may contain meaning that transcends the obvious and does not require a tidy, clear, satisfying ending. Many of the best essayists describe experiences and allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Much like poetry, a good essay welcomes the reader’s imagination. This way of writing works in fiction and creative nonfiction alike.

In other words, if you publish a story about a walk on a beach, the reader will be disappointed if the only place you go with the piece is to an Adirondack chair to sit down and think about how much you like to watch seabirds. Readers hope you will pick up a seashell, and, upon further inspection and introspection, suddenly know the meaning of life – or some such drivel. Better still, the writer walks along a beach and sees a perfect world – an exquisite moment in the eternal perfection of God’s Everlasting Creation – and then he steps on that same seashell from the previous version of this afternoon and bleeds all the way back to his towel, where he had abandoned his flip-flops, leading the sympathetic reader to feel the writer may have stumbled upon a painful truth. Of those three versions of this story, I like the third attempt best, as it works with the reader’s imagination to expose the complex, contradictory nature of life. Each reader’s interpretation will be unique and personal.

In many situations in life, there’s what appears to be going on and there’s what’s really going on. A man yells at his dog. He’s actually upset because he’s done something stupid and now he’s in big trouble. You can write that the guy yelled at his dog because he’s angry at himself, but then the story’s sort of over and you haven’t sold a book. Or, you show him yelling at his dog. If your audience hangs around to find out why, you can gradually reveal intriguing elements of his life, which beg further questions and further reasons to keep reading. In time, you have shallow graves in the back yard (empty ones!) and the Swiss Army is looking for him. It’s the responsibility of the readers to find the bodies.

So, in hopes of engaging readers, try to tell a story that’s pretty good, but tuck some of it just beneath surface of the words; resist spoon-feeding your audience with clues to where it’s hiding. Hemingway hid 90 percent of the story from his readers and got away with it. This is tricky stuff, because some people won’t see what’s not obvious, even though it may be the whole point of the work. And then they’ll call you a hack, which you very well may be. If you wish to win a literary prize, bury your subtext so deeply only Joyce Carol Oates will be able to find it.

One more thing. Forget the meaning of life. Even if you know what it is, if you sneak that into your writing, no one will believe you and you will, without doubt, contradict what someone else knows to be the grand purpose of it all. Instead of answers, offer great questions and let your readers answer them for themselves.

WHAT IS CREATIVE NONFICTION?

The primary distinction between Creative Nonfiction (CNF) and more traditional essays, such as the academic type, is the amount of artistic license taken by the writer. Both are written from the viewpoint of the writer. Both must be done in the spirit of honest storytelling. But in CNF, the storyteller, as Mark Twain said, doesn’t always let truth get in the way of a good story – some details might be improved a little.

Prose of the creative nonfiction writer may be more poetic and subjective than that of the traditional essayist and draw upon such tools of fiction as simile and metaphor, vivid scenes and well-developed characters to construct compelling narratives.

AVOIDING THE UNAVOIDABLE

I try to avoid sentimentality in my storytelling. The professional writing world feels it’s a cheap trick for “serious writers” to intentionally toy with the emotions of readers. I try to recognize the mawkish, maudlin and nostalgic in my work and eradicate it during rewrites, as a gardener pulls weeds, especially in memoir, the natural habitat of nostalgia, but it still gets in. For this reason, I limit my strolls down Memory Lane, that mythical land probably more wonderful now than it was long, long ago.

WHO AM I?

I write short essays about experiences that seem too special or important to go unreported.

One of my stories is about an old man on a riverside park bench in New Orleans, yelling to no one in particular, to the world. Alone in a drifting fog in the darkness of pre-dawn, he cries out truth as he sees it. In other posts, I remember the greatest pickup truck in the world. I make a case for hoarding books you haven’t read. I tell of meeting, in the middle of a shady street, a seasoned yard man who schooled me in the maintenance of Victorian mansions and shared, in fine detail, the filmography of an actress. I imagine a tongue-in-cheek world in which elegant Christmas trees avoid the irony of holiday indifference by paying tribute to whimsy, lest pretense and sophistication render them aloof as they pose, propped above perfume counters and in bank lobbies, standing for very little.

This kind of writing showed up early in my career. My first job, which started two days out of college, was a news reporter and photographer position at a small, afternoon daily in Missouri. My name had been on the front page of the paper just about every day for a few months when the general manager dropped a gift in my lap that would change my life. He gave me a front-page space once a week in which to put anything I wanted to write. His name was Joe Norton. He liked my work, gave me a good camera to use and kept the darkroom well supplied with black-and-white film and chemicals. I shot all of the photos that accompanied my articles and developed all of the film I shot. In retrospect, it was the best job I’ve ever had. I was, of course, quite poor.

I owe Joe a tremendous debt for his commitment to small-town journalism and his belief in me. We called my weekly column The Big Picture. I barely knew what a column was supposed to be. What freedom for a young writer! I filled it with observations of life around town and elsewhere, of unusual or remarkable people, places, events (anything but religion or politics) – things that seemed worthy of consideration, that our readers might otherwise never hear about. In later years, at two other newspapers, while serving as editor and on a copy desk, I continued to write essays and feature stories occasionally.

After 10 years in the newspaper business, I saw the industry succumbing to ever-growing competition for advertising dollars. The future of my livelihood appeared uncertain, so I left the business (ok, sold out). At that point, I nearly stopped writing, as I no longer had easy access to readers. I started doing 3D computer animation for corporate training, television commercials and government research – a new and promising field.

Job security wasn’t the only reason I left journalism. I had been reporting the interesting lives of other people. I felt a nagging sense of wanting to go out in the world and do new things myself. So I did. When I had learned more about the world, about life, I would return to writing, even if it were toward the end of my career. I believe there are two primary components of writing; there’s the writing – the composition of sentences, paragraphs and so on – and then there is having something worthwhile to say. That second part is by far the most important. Some people seem to be geniuses early in life; they write at age 25 with the wisdom of an old soul. I wasn’t that guy, but at least I knew it.

Eventually, my career in technical animation and marketing communications took me New Orleans, where writers find the grand dame of the South irresistibly charming and evocative. I lived on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, in Slidell, and commuted to an office in the city for 20 years, 14 of them at an offshore engineering firm occupying a century-old building on St. Charles Ave., right on the Uptown Mardi Gras parade route.

In the second decade of my time in New Orleans, roughly 100 of my Facebook friends (many became dear friends in real life, not just online) belonged to a Mardi Gras walking parade krewe and shared a love for the culture of the city. Some were New Orleans locals or, like my wife and I, lived in nearby suburbs, but most were scattered around the country and a few lived abroad. They got together in New Orleans every year at Mardi Gras. For them, and for myself, I began to write of things I found special in New Orleans and about small adventures in that most flamboyant, mysterious and European of American cities.

I developed a sensibility, an openness, to the spirit some say dwells in New Orleans – a presence that whispers in many tongues of faded glory and unforgiveable sin. Such intimacy is courted at the price of innocence, for the celebrated taste of lavish, unapologetic self-indulgence turns out to be a bitter absinthe made palatable by an artful application of sugar.

According to my favorite writer, renowned essayist E.B. White, the essay writer is driven by a desire to share important and beautiful discoveries.

In the following years, I wrote about life elsewhere in South Louisiana and in Southeast Texas, where my wife was born. When I traveled to other places, I would issue reports from there. I shared, of course, encounters with people; the practitioners and maintenance crew of any particular culture.

“As a writing man … I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost. But it is not easy to communicate anything of this nature,” White wrote.

I initially posted many of these essays on Facebook, which gave me a small audience; just enough to make writing not seem pointless. Eventually, a few of my readers encouraged me to do something – anything – with these pieces other than let them lie buried and forgotten on an unpredictable social media platform, so I built this website to place my work under my control.

Much of this content was composed in haste on an iPhone in cars and hotel lobbies, on park benches and riverbanks – anywhere I happened to be when struck by the mood to share an experience. In fear that my phone battery would die or Facebook would crash, deleting an oh-so-precious unpublished manuscript, I posted them after nothing more than a quick scan for typos. When I finally retrieved these pieces from Facebook to move them to this site, I realized they were rough, first drafts that might be made more worthwhile if I revisited them with fresh eyes and put more effort into them.

I went to work on all of them, often making pieces much longer than the first versions. I deleted some content and added much. On this website, I decided to list original publication dates. Some articles include dated information, so date of first publication is important to the reader. I saw little benefit in cluttering every post with revision metadata.

I consider everything on the site new work. Even for very short, perhaps frivolous, pieces that I had put together on my phone in 30 minutes, I often spent two to four hours rewriting. With longer articles that I cared more about, it took eight to 12 hours or more of revision to get them into shape. Anyone who remembers them as originally posted on Facebook may barely recognize them now.

Sometimes a certain magic happens in the initial flurry of thought and composition of a first draft. One begins to write and out come things you have never considered before; ideas you didn’t know were in you. And you look at these surprises and think the writing is pretty good. If you are on a short deadline you turn them in as they are. Then, the worst thing that can happen often happens. Your friends or family tell you these quick and dirty scribbles are really good. This is the proverbial kiss of death for any writer, especially a young one. With no better writer around to show you how inept you really are, you may never get much better; I’ve seen this happen multiple times. A famous writer (I can’t recall who) wrote that almost no great writers have the ability to create great work on the first try, and the rare few who can, “we hate them all.”

Keep writing long enough and keep reading the works of superb writers, and if you don’t give up you might learn that good writing happens in the daily grind of planting your backside in a chair and working to make pieces better, whether you feel like doing it on any particular day or not. The muse you thought was responsible for the first drafts may not show up for these sessions. Too bad. Even after you labor over requisite multiple revisions, your work still may be mediocre, if not awful. You wanted to be a writer. Well, this is what it’s like.

I don’t promote this site, run any ads or ask readers to pay for content. I write, for now, solely to become a better writer. While I have a once-in-my-lifetime window of time to write without the corrupting influence of employment or need for social currency, to discover what is in me to say, I’m taking the opportunity, come what may. This is freedom.

Photos on this site, unless otherwise attributed, are my own, shot with an iPhone.

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