I've written more than dozens of blog essays now. Here's how I write my essays. The majority of essays I write about are in the "Thinking" category, with some technical blogs too, but the following mostly apply to my "Thinking" essays.
What's an essay? In my interpretation, an essay is a written snapshot of one's flow of ideas.
The flow of ideas start with a trigger. For me, the trigger is usually an observation of anomaly, or a profound story I experienced.
The trigger then prompts a set of questions, which invites a set of answers, which elicits even more questions, and so forth. Along the way, evidence, reasoning, and conclusions are thrown in. And this flow of stuff becomes typed down and compiled into an essay.
In essays, sometimes my later reasoning overthrew the initial conclusion, and I'm back to the clean slate again.
Writing 1,000 words can take a long time, because generating, correcting, and enriching the initial spark of idea takes a long time. Typing it down is slow because between words typed, thinking is happening, and good thinking takes time. And sometimes you are back to the clean slate.
As I berated here, unlike school assignment papers, true essays don't need to be a fixed structure.
If it's a interesting topic, that you as the writer cares about, that you as the writer can offer an interesting angle or, even better, surprising angle to it, that makes the reader engaged and walk away with some new understanding and new curiosity questions, it's a good essay.
Good essay fine-tunes the reader's thinking. In rare cases, it completely rewrites the reader's mental model. If that happens, it likely is a nobel-prize level article.
And it's not just the answers put forth. It's also about the questions asked in the essays that become planted in the reader's mind too. Without the essay, the reader might not have even thought about wondering this question at all, and certainly not the importance of implication of the questions.
In a world of AI and LinkedIn slop, we need more good essays.