I woke up one morning to discover that I was an essayist (but) it was not what I had in mind for myself … As an essayist friend of mine has pointed out, one of the problems with the essay as a form, is that everyone has written one … In the family of writers, essayists play poor cousins to writers of fiction or narrative nonfiction. But great things have been accomplished in essays, which are the natural medium of ideas. Essays yield many of the nuggets of wisdom that inform everyday life, including the one line of Emerson’s that everyone knows: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Essays are a congenial form for the divided mind. Montaigne blessed the form when he said, “If I knew my own mind, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.

Richard Todd, editor and journalist and author of the book of essays, The Thing Itself.

There is something you want to say, and yet you are dogged by the perennial questions. Who am I to be writing this? Who asked me? And cruellest of all, who cares? The essay is the all-purpose form that describes the efforts of sharing your mind. Essays are self-authorizing. The chances are that nobody asked for your opinion. This is the dilemma but also the pleasure of the form.

Most good essays transcend argument. Emerson and Thoreau may be remembered as otherworldly spirits who wrote in opposition to the materialism of their time. But on the page, they were swashbucklers. Thoreau might have been our best-known hermit, but if you listen to him at the start of “Walking”, it is not a hermit’s reticence that you encounter:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute Freedom and Wildness, as contrasted with a Freedom and Culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society …

In an essay by Thoreau, the “I” is the measure of all things. All its experiences can be brought to bear; no subject is too small to notice or too big to contemplate. Emerson wrote even more expansively and aphoristically, and in describing the transcendentalist, he contributed the ultimate metaphor for the essayist’s relationship to the world: “I become a transparent eyeball.”

People speak of the “personal essay” as a form, but all essays are personal. They may make sweeping pronouncements, but they bear the stamp of the individual mind. For writers, the essay can offer an escape from the tyranny of Importance. You don’t need to have fought wars, climbed mountains, received the confidences of presidents; you can have the most mundane of experiences and make something that surpasses them. In Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting”, for example, the nominal subject is the writer’s errand in the early evening, a stroll to a stationer’s store in search of a pencil. The stroll becomes the occasion for thought about the nature of solitude, and about the consolidation of the self in the home versus the dissolution of self in the city. The small experience keeps ramifying into something else. She remembers standing on the doorstep of the stationer’s and thinks,

It is always an adventure to enter a new room, for the lives and characters of its owners have distilled their atmosphere into it and directly we enter it and we taste some new wave of emotion

The essayist’s relationship with the reader depends as always on mutual trust, but trust of a special kind. In the essay, trust in the author and disagreement with the author can coexist. In an essay about essays, Cynthia Ozick describes her experiences of reading Emerson:

I may not be persuaded by Emersonianism as an ideology, but Emerson – his voice, his language, his music – persuades me … I may regard (or discard) the idea of the soul as no better than a puff of warm vapor. But here is Emerson on the soul: “When it breathes through [man’s] intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love.” And then – well, I am in thrall. I am persuaded. I believe.

In the essay, you ask the reader to take you seriously, to honor your convictions even if your ideas provoke more than they persuade. You welcome the silent dialogue with the reader, even if the reader is disputing with you. After all, you are often in dispute with yourself: beliefs are reached in the course of writing, and essays trace the course. Self-doubt, fatal in some many enterprises, fortifies the essay.

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All the genres blur, but none is blurrier than the essay. The line between essay and memoir is particularly porous. You may turn to the essay as a refuge from memoir, and essays may then serve as covert memoirs. You say some things about yourself while you generalize from your experience in ways that seem worthy of the reader’s attention. George Orwell’s “Such, Such Were the Joys” appears in his collected essays, but for most of the way it reads as a memoir of his schoolboy days. But Orwell broadens the piece into wisdom about the nature of childhood itself, with a direct appeal to the reader’s own experience: “Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer.” There is something uplifting about this stance, which takes the essay beyond the uniqueness of personal experiences, beyond “poor me.” Orwell doesn’t lament the evanescence of memory. What’s gone is gone, but what’s left behind is better.

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In one of its modes – humor – the essay sometimes breaks the basic rule of nonfiction. The humorous essay often turns on self-mockery, and once you are mocking yourself, the reader is less likely to dispute your right to use hyperbole. David Sedaris, the best-known current master of the humorous essay, came to literary prominence with his “SantaLand Diaries.” An essay that describes his service as one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s department store in New York. This piece skewers not only a commercialized Christmas holiday but the overbearing mothers and insufferable children who celebrate it. Does Sedaris overstate when he says that he told a misbehaving child that Santa would come to his house and steal his television and all his appliances? Doubtless so, but the piece rests on the absurdity of its author’s role. It takes some courage to admit to having been a hired elf. Having done so, you may be forgiven a scene like the one in which Sedaris claims to have used sign language as he said to a deaf child in a loud clear voice” “SANTA HAS A TUMOR IN HIS HEAD THE SIZE OF AN OLIVE. MAYBE IT WILL GO AWAY TOMORROW BUT I DON’T THINK SO.”

What can you learn from practitioners of the essay, in all its variety? Every essayist deals with the same general ingredients – self, experiences and idea – but everyone deals with them differently. Good essayists share the ability and the confidence to use the power of their own highly specified convictions. No one gives you permission to write the essay. You do it. You get away with it. Soon the experience entitles you to do it again.

Extracts (with minor editions) from “Essays”, a chapter in Good Prose by Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Random House, 2013.