About the Author
WEIRD SCIENCE
Carolyn Nesbitt, author of "The Old Sort: Of Connemaras & Sweet Corn"

When Carolyn Nesbitt began writing essays, it was an attempt to make sense out of a lot of disparate ideas. "I've always been interested in huge numbers of things, most of which bear no resemblance to each other." Writing was a way to find a common thread that united her thoughts and to answer questions.

Nesbitt finds nature fascinating. "Genetics has always interested me and I am no scientist." She is a self-declared "back-to-the-land hippie" that looks at hens that don't lay eggs or at hybrid corn when it reproduces that just starts her asking the question: "What are we doing?"

She realizes that not everybody finds that subject material of interest and that she had to work hard to make "The Old Sort" appealing to read, even for herself. "Sometimes I would find myself falling asleep over the material and think that if I am not interested in this, nobody else is going to be either." She challenges herself to make seemingly different ideas cohesive. She ended up having to cut the original essay in half three times. "It was long and it rambled everywhere. It was a question of looking at it and saying: What am I trying to say?" Figuring out how to unite four or five themes and make transitions between them is one of her greatest challenges.

Nesbitt began writing for horse magazines right out of college. She made part of her living riding and training horses, and saw that the horse magazines at that time were "essentially functionally illiterate." She calls that writing, as well as public relations work she did for 10 more years, her "trench work."

Though she still writes three or four horse pieces a year, and has a national byline, her interest shifted to personal essay and creative nonfiction. "Creative nonfiction suits me. I like thinking out loud. In fact I used to joke when I was in college that what I really wanted to be was a tin-pot philosopher in a cafe somewhere. Creative nonfiction is about as close as you get to that," she says, laughing.

Nesbitt is also an actress and strongly believes that acting and writing feed one another. "When you are doing theater, doing a role, it is almost the same thing because you are imparting a certain kind of very specific information to people, but unless you find a way to make them react to it viscerally, meaning embodying your character with all of your garbage and all of your joy and all of your passion, all of your troubles and everything that is bothering you that day, then you don't have something that is accessible." She enjoys the balance between writing and acting. Theater provides a human outlet for her that can be missed when writing. "All of us who are writers know, you sit there for hours on end and it is completely surreal, and you are communicating only with people who you have invented, and it gets a little bizarre after a while."

She does not have a problem writing between genres. "It is actually kind of nice to move back and forth because if one thing gets stale you can jump start yourself with the other and that can be very helpful." She is currently working on a novel, a new essay and two theater articles.

She is very conscious of the attention span of her audience when she writes. "When you are dealing with material that can be pretty daunting you have to be really careful that you are being correct in your thinking, but not academic in the way you promote it." She works hard at finding a voice that can convey information without becoming rigid and relies on her acting experience to help her. "A lot of times if I am going through a passage that I am not certain of, I read it out loud because if I can't speak it so that it sounds legitimate then I don't think it is going to come across really well on the page."

She shows her work to two close friends and says she learned not to take offense to blatant feedback. "When somebody criticizes you , you have to say, 'You know you are absolutely right.' You have to take a deep breath say goodbye to it, cut it. I've gotten pretty cold-blooded about editing my own work in that way. I think it is one of the hardest things for writers to learn is how to be a self-editor." She relies on her readers to reign her in when she begins to edit out the material that she needs to keep. After about four drafts, she sends a piece out and lets the market determine whether the piece is ready.

For beginning writers she advises: "Keep doing it and get over yourself. I find that I have to admit that a lot of the stuff that I read is so much about a personal experience and so little is about what larger thing that might have to say about the world. I want to say okay you have done that, it was really interesting and it was wonderfully therapeutic and I understand your torture but what are you going to do with it now?"

A lot of the creative nonfiction she writes is dense, in terms of genetics and scientific terms, but she says that is not what it is really about. "It is about humanity. The balance is that once I understand what it is I am getting at in that way that really isn't about ponies necessarily, the trick is not to beat people over the head with it, and let people find that conclusion themselves."

The time to be picky, she advises, is not in the beginning. Rarely does a writer know what the piece is going to say in its first stages. "We know what we think we want to say, but I think an awful lot of the time you write something that ends up being something completely different than what it started out to be and much more interesting ultimately." She advises hanging in there long enough to break through to the heart of the piece.

She also recommends taking a break after doing a piece, which is a major reason that writers get blocked. "When you are done you are empty and it is good to just give yourself a break."

Corinne Platt