We recently had the pleasure of interviewing Elisa Gabbert for Women of Letters, and in preparation for that publication (as I do with all of our publications) I spent some time immersing myself in her recent work.
I was reminded, in the process, of her 2024 interview with the LARB, in which she discussed how she writes the endings for her essays:
“In terms of the endings—it’s funny, I actually started using this trick in college, maybe even in high school. When I was writing a ‘paper,’ I never wanted the last paragraph to feel like a summary, so I’d always save one good point to make there. Now, I do a lot of the thinking and connection-making in the notes process before I even start writing the essay. Then, when I sit down to write, I’m trying to have at least 20 to 30 percent new thoughts, so it doesn’t feel too predetermined. Ideally, some of those new ideas are happening toward the end—it’s like we got there together!”
It’s an idea that’s stuck with me, and one that I’ve incorporated into my own work ever since. (In writing the chapters that comprise my doctoral dissertation, for example, I specifically set aside some of the insights that would traditionally have been placed in the ‘results’ or ‘discussion’ sections of each chapter for their conclusions.) As both a writer and a reader, I’m finding that I like the way this approach opens up those texts — makes them feel more expansive, somehow — as though there were even more excellent ideas that could have been added to each one had it not eventually had to end at some point.
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Recommended reading
- “From: Steve Jobs. ‘Great idea, thank you,’” by Steve Hayman
- “What problem should you be working on now?,” by Henrik Karlsson
- “The surprising ways that siblings shape our lives,” by Susan Dominus
- Liars, by Sarah Manguso (I raced through it in less than a day)
Once a month, I share a curated collection of ideas I keep returning to: concepts that are surfacing in my work, questions I’m wrestling with, patterns I’m noticing. These posts are my way of thinking out loud and sparking some interesting conversations along the way.
This series is part of an ongoing experiment in exploring how to most meaningfully share what I know while connecting with others who care about similar ideas. (See also: my weekly office hours.)
This post is the 4th instalment in the series. If you’re interested in learning more, have a peek at the previous posts for April, March, and February. And if you enjoyed reading this post, stay tuned for the next instalment at the end of June.
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Jana M. Perkins, PhD, M.Sc., M.A., is an award-winning scholar and the director of Women of Letters. Her research has garnered over a quarter of a million dollars in funding from leading institutions across North America and the UK, including the University of Cambridge and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). As an academically trained data scientist with a background in classical literary scholarship, her expertise extends across disciplines to yield the unique analytical frameworks which characterize her approach. Her forthcoming first book, co-authored with Miranda Brun Hickman, will be published by Routledge.
Visit her online at janajm.com or @janajm on Instagram.