Research in CNF

If you write enough, you discover what kind of writer you are; that is, you finally figure out what kind  of pieces you like to write, and what kind you are good at.  I've been writing personal essays for a long time but it's only in the last few years that I figured out what kind of essayist I am:  I'm mostly a writer of researched essays like this one.

I suppose my background as an academic makes it more likely that my instinct would be to look outside of myself to better understand what's going on inside.  But I think my interest in backfilling my narratives with research has mostly to do with how weary I am of telling the same old stories about myself.  I write essays to pull up the tracks on old story lines, to find new ways of understanding things. In my experience, nothing does this as effectively as some surprisingly relevant finding from a book or article that helps me to name the thing I feel.  Once, when writing about nostalgia and the way it directs our gaze in self-defeating ways, I stumbled on a study about something called "pathological nostalgia."  Yes, I thought, that's the kind of nostalgia I'm writing about.

Just as often, though, the research gives me something new to think about. My current project explores my interest in manual typewriters, and in the process of reading everything I could find about the history of the typewriter I discovered that in the 1880s typewriter racing was a national passion.  How weird, I thought.  And how wonderful.  What possibly could make that exciting?  This was new, unexpected material and I spent days fastwriting about it, and now I've added two pages of new material to the draft.

Finally, simple fact-checks can be surprisingly rich for me.  In the same essay on nostalgia, I remembered a solar eclipse when I was ten.  It seemed dark for a long time, and I thought to check exactly how long that eclipse lasted. Historical data like that is easy to find on the internet, and I did find that the eclipse occurred that summer in northern Wisconsin and discovered exactly how long it lasted.  It was shorter than I remembered.  This fact--and the way it was at odds with memory--suggested what a truly dark time that was for me back then. I sensed, as a result, that I was getting closer to the truth of how it felt to be me, and all because of a Google search on solar eclipses.