Michele Morano, "Creating Meaning Through Structure" (5.1)

ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
5.1

Michele Morano

Creating Meaning Through Structure

Fall 2018 Spotlight:
The "So What" Factor in Nonfiction

Part 1: Breakfast Before Bed

Some years ago, while teaching an introduction to creative nonfiction course in graduate school, I worked with a student—one of those handsome, blocky young men, fit and strong and confident because of it—who was clear about his reason for taking the course: his GPA needed a boost. He told this to the class on day one, with a smile that said yeah, he knew it was lame, but at least he was honest, and since he’d be writing about his own life, an “A” should be within reach. This student was very proud of his first essay, which he volunteered for workshop, and which described how, when he was a boy, it was hard for him to wake up in the morning. Often he didn’t have enough time to eat breakfast, but he was a growing kid and really needed breakfast, so he developed an ingenious remedy: each night he’d get into his pajamas, pour a big bowl of cereal, and eat. He managed to stretch what I’ve just recounted to over three pages, and to title it, in case anyone missed the point, “Breakfast Before Bed.” That young man would be nearly forty now, perhaps married and with a family and, I sincerely hope, a job that he loves and that pays him well. I don’t remember his name, but not a month passes in my house without a reference to “Breakfast Before Bed.” It’s shorthand for aiming as low as possible and squarely hitting the mark.

Recently, during an introductory drawing class I was taking at an art studio in my Chicago neighborhood, I developed a new connection to this student. I have no training or talent in visual art, and I signed up for the class thinking that drawing would be a relaxing counterpart to the writing life. It isn’t. Drawing is hard. Every week, after two hours of drawing and erasing, drawing and erasing, I stumbled out of the studio with a blinding headache, my shoulders tight with concentration. But during week five, something finally clicked, and with a little help from my instructor and a piece of charcoal, I made two recognizable apples and a vase appear on the paper. Their curves were defined, the shading gave them a 3-D quality, each object was in proportion to the others. I nearly hyperventilated with pride. After the instructor paid me some compliments and the other students gathered around to admire what I’d done, I spent the last minutes of class darkening lines and smudging shadows before asking whether the picture was finished.

I was being falsely modest. Of course it was finished. Charcoal covered the entire page. The two apples looked like apples, and the vase stood tall and symmetrical, with a miraculous shimmer near the bottom. Maybe, I thought, I had talent after all. Maybe I would take Drawing II and then Painting I, maybe I would get a studio at the Lill Street Art Center, maybe there would be a gallery show in my future. Then the instructor stood behind me and bent forward, her cheek nearly touching my shoulder, and laughed. “No, you’re not done!” she said, as if I were a child who had put on one shoe and was ready to go outside. She stood up again and listed the next half-dozen things I could do to “give the picture more meaning.” Meaning? I had a vase and two apples, sitting in asymmetrical proximity on a table, the light bouncing just so. What kind of meaning did she want?

Which is surely what my student thought when we workshopped “Breakfast Before Bed,” suggesting ways to expand and themes to explore. He didn’t want to explore! He wanted a round of applause for having wrestled with enough words to summarize his lived experience on the page. My charcoal-covered paper was the visual equivalent of that essay, a what-you-see-is-what-you-get composition that communicated nothing more than surface-level reality. In terms of creating a work of art, I had taken only the first step.

Part 2: Story of Thought

In writing, the first step is often motivated by a strong memory or emotion or by a desire to set something right. Particularly in nonfiction, we might write what has shocked or saddened or injured us. We might write out of anger or revenge or curiosity, to solve a mystery or learn more about an obsession. These are all fine impulses, as long as we don’t end with them. That you’re curious about something doesn’t mean readers should also be curious. If you’re angry or hurt or still in shock after all these years, that’s the starting point, not the end. In early drafts, we focus on getting it all down, on sketching scenes and filling in details, on making a three-dimensional experience come to life in two dimensions, but at some point we have to ask, “So what?” Why should readers care?

To answer this question, it’s important to remember that, generally speaking, we don’t read creative nonfiction in order to find out what happened. We read to understand how a writer makes sense of experience and carries it forward in life. We read for perspective. And perspective is often very closely tied on the page to structure.

The way I understand structure is indebted to Carl Klaus, founder of the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and a remarkable essayist and scholar of the essay. In Carl’s workshop classes, he emphasized story above all, but he was careful to distinguish between “story of experience” and “story of thought,” the latter of which he describes in his wonderful book, The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, as: “The drama of mind in action. Thought and the process of thought united in a single text.” Often the meaning in a personal essay or memoir comes from a writer’s attention to how perspective develops, and very often structure facilitates that attention.

To understand this, let’s look at three essays with wildly different structures: a single-scene memory described in mostly chronological order, an interrogation of identity segmented into three parts, and a wholly disjunctive exploration of a dilemma.

Ryan Van Meter’s “First”
Even in a chronological narrative essay, there are two stories being related, one focused on what happened and the other on how the writer understands it. Ryan Van Meter’s lovely short essay, “First,” recounts the experience of proposing marriage, at five years old, to a boy the narrator loves. The essay begins: “Ben and I are sitting side by side in the very back of his mother’s station wagon. We face glowing white headlights of cars following us, our sneakers pressed against the back hatch door. This is our joy—his and mine—to sit turned away from our moms and dads in this place that fees like a secret, as though they are not even in the car with us.” The present-tense narration places readers close to the five-year-old’s perspective, but very quickly Van Meter the author steps in to clarify that this is not a five-year-old’s story. “Years from this evening, I won’t actually be sure that this boy sitting beside me is named Ben. But that doesn’t matter tonight. What I know for certain right now...” Without stepping away from the scene in the back of the station wagon, Van Meter interjects the story of thought, dramatizing the questioning of experience and developing of perspective that is part of the nonfiction writer’s craft.

Paragraph 2 opens with a similar bit of context: “Ben is the first brown-eyed boy I will fall for but will not be the last.” With this concise flash forward, Van Meter clarifies that this experience isn’t simply a cute story of a child’s understanding of romance but is deeply connected to the narrator’s identity as a gay man. Shortly after comes a flashback to the boy watching soap operas with his mother, from which he learned that love is grand and true love leads to marriage, but most of the rest of the essay takes place in the recreated present tense, in the back of the car where the boys exchange “I love you’s,” the narrator proposes, the narrator’s mother insists that boys can’t marry boys, and the intense shame of societal expectation descends upon them. In terms of chronology, the essay spans no more than five minutes with a short flashback, but because of the early introduction of story of thought, the whole essay takes on the tenor of lasting experience. “So what?” Here’s how the essay’s metaphoric ending answers that question:

She asks again. “Okay? Did you hear me?”
“Yes!” this time nearly shouting, and I wish we were already home so I could jump out and run to my bedroom. To be back here in the dark, private tail of the car suddenly feels wrong so Ben and I each scoot off to our separate sides. “Yes,” I say again, almost normally, turning away to face the rainy window. I feel her turn too as the radio baseball voice comes back up out of the quiet. The car starts to dip as we head down the hill of our street; our house is at the bottom. No one speaks for the rest of the ride. We all just sit and wait and watch our own views of the road—the parents see what is ahead of us while the only thing I can look at is what we have just left behind.”

The five-year-old, we understand, is not aware of looking at what they’ve left behind. He doesn’t know a permanent shift has occurred in his understanding of himself and love and what it means to be marked as different and ashamed of who you are. But the narrator understands and has utilized the deceptively simple structure of this essay to emphasize perspective and, in the process, create meaning.

James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son”
There is much to say about this masterful and phenomenally instructive essay, but even a cursory look at its structure reveals an important aspect of how Baldwin’s creates perspective on the page. The essay offers a loose chronological order divided into three numbered segments. In the first, Baldwin opens with the story of experience: “On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem.” This experiential context grounds the essay before Baldwin moves away from the funeral to develop a much larger personal, familial, and cultural story. But each of the subsequent sections returns to the experiential story of the funeral, so that the surface-level narrative focuses each section’s exploration of identity, legacy, and the effect of pervasive racial violence.

Throughout the essay, underneath Baldwin’s searing portrayal not just of a country built upon racial injustice but his father’s—and his own—toxic response to that injustice, a story of thought is developing. I don’t just mean that Baldwin is developing an idea or an argument, though he is, but that he is narrating the story of his increasing perspective, of how he began to shift from being a son contemptuous of his father “for the conditions of his life, for the conditions of our lives” to a son who recognizes in his father the self-immolating hatred that racism engenders. Attending his father’s funeral is a crucial moment in the development of that perspective, but it’s the narrator, not the nineteen-year-old Baldwin, whose way of thinking is dramatized. At several points in the essay, Baldwin makes clear this separation between younger self and narrator, as when he comments on his father’s disdain for white people: “I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would,” and when he recalls how years of taking care of his younger brothers and sisters “had had the perhaps inevitable result of making me love them, though I am not sure I understood this then” (italics mine). The wisdom of this essay belongs to the writer of it, to the man who has remembered and interrogated and reflected and crafted in order to arrive at the tour de force final paragraph, which begins:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength.

Although the phrase “It began to seem” is tied in the essay to the moment of the funeral, Baldwin’s accumulated perspective makes clear that this is a retrospective beginning identified and articulated by a more mature self. The essay ends with Baldwin recalling his younger self, having glimpsed the truth that only later would he fully understand, wishing that he could have searched his father’s face for answers to the questions he hadn’t known to ask when the man was alive. To this younger self is attributed an awareness that the essay has otherwise located in the writer looking back, so that the ending dramatizes the accumulation of memory and reflection that comprises any narrative “I.” One of the many qualities that makes this a great essay, and I would argue one of the greatest American essays we have, is the union of what Claus terms “thought and the process of thought” that demonstrates Baldwin’s piercing, magnanimous, and hard-won perspective.

Robin Black’s “The Answer That Increasingly Appeals”
Now let’s consider the more complex structure of one of my favorite essays to teach, Robin Black’s “The Answer That Increasingly Appeals.” The story of experience in this essay revolves around the narrator’s visit with a rabbi in advance of her daughter’s upcoming bat mitzvah. This rite is complicated for the narrator by her Protestant father’s impending death and by her distance from the Jewish traditions her mother did not pass down. The underlying question of the essay is ultimately similar to Baldwin’s conclusion. How does a woman come to terms with two seemingly contradictory ideas: one, that organized religion holds little appeal for her personally, and two, that she is raising her own daughter as a Jew so that she’ll “have somewhere to turn in times of loss”?

Both the story of experience and the story of thought advance in this essay through a delightfully disjunctive structure guided by italicized fragments of a seemingly random list. Early on these include:

9:47 a.m. Nov 7, deceptively complex thing my brother says to me on the phone:
“There’s actually a new book out called The Half-Jewish Book that I was going to buy you for Christmas, but
it costs twenty-five dollars In fact, I was wondering if maybe this Christmas we could just skip grown-up gifts altogether.”
9:47 a.m. Nov. 7, my immediate response:
“Actually, I could really use some presents this year.”

The essay interweaves humor and quotidian information (“My most prized possession,” “Principle by which my cabinets are organized”) with more poignant information that develops the essay’s through-line (“Reason my father is concerned about authorizing anyone to pull the plug,” “Number of minutes the rabbi is late for our meeting,” “Occasions for the grief that left me feeling at sea”). In the process of compiling experiential information into this list, Black creates a masterful display of what Scott Russell Sanders describes as “the closest thing we have, on paper, to a record of the mind at work and play.”
For example:

Question Elizabeth will ask when my father dies:
“Am I allowed to say kaddish for Grandfather even though he wasn’t Jewish?”
Authority with which I will say, “Of course”:
Circa 1975, my mother on the subject of organized religion:
  “It’s all horseshit.”
Throughout my childhood, my father on the subject of organized religion:
  “If I really wanted to be rich, filthy rich, wealthy beyond all dreams of avarice, and did not believe in
the Lord, Jesus Christ, which I most certainly do, I would make up a religion and just watch the money come pouring in.”
After her heart attack, my mother, again, on the subject of religion:
  “I know it’s all horseshit, but are you comfortable promising me that someone will say kaddish for me when I am gone?”

The essay moves both chronologically, through setting up the appointment with the rabbi and then the actual meeting, with some entries time/date stamped (“10:12a.m. Nov. 9, snippet of my telephone conversation with the rabbi:” “12:42 p.m. Nov. 10, statement that I hear coming out of my own mouth:”), and also associatively, through digressions and asides. The effect of this structure is to enact for readers the process of grappling with the deeply philosophic nature of some of life’s most important moments. This essay illustrates the narrator’s eventual landing in a place of acceptance, where the contradictions of feelings and beliefs no longer need to be reconciled. In the process, the story of experience gives way to a story of thought that explores not just the Montaignian question, “Que sais-je?” (“What do I know?”) but the ever-present, implicit questions, “How do I know it?” and “So what that I do?”

Part 3: Beyond the Vase

It’s better not to ask “So what?” too early in the writing process, because our internal critics are often ready to answer: “Readers shouldn’t care. It’s a dumb idea. Delete!” Rather, we have to draw and erase, draw and smudge, making messes for a while before we begin to see the potential in the material. During that process, it’s important to trust that if an experience or a question or an obsession or the desire to understand something has stayed with you, and especially if it remains a puzzle, if you can’t easily figure out what it means, then it’s worth pursuing.

I know this, at least in writing, but I had to re-learn it again with my picture of the two apples and the vase. What was the meaning of that still life? What could it show readers that looking at the apples and the vase in real life couldn’t? The answer came after I stood for a while longer in front of my easel, looking from the three-dimensional objects to the two-dimensional rendering and asking myself what was different. What was there in reality that hadn’t yet appeared on the page? A lot, it turned out. When I looked more closely and allowed what was in my mind about vases—their curves, function, proportions—to fall away, I saw what should have been obvious: the vase was transparent. While I had drawn the object itself, what existed before me wasn’t an empty vessel but one that contained the things beyond it: a wall, the edge of a chair, a table with an array of charcoal atop it, everything distorted as if to 20/60 vision. Maybe, I thought, my picture had something to say about perception itself, about how we develop the ability to see through and, in the process, to change what we understand, believe, appreciate. Not that I could convey that meaning in charcoal, since I remained a poor visual artist challenged by a lack of patience, but I could see it beginning to form. A story of thought was taking shape, and if I could start the picture over again, I would change its structure, edit out parts of the apples, enlarge the vase and focus on what it helped me see.

Structure remains, for me as a writer, the mechanism not just for answering the “So what?” question but for pushing myself to consider the question throughout the process of drafting. I encourage students to experiment with all kinds of structures, from essays that borrow other forms (what Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola term “hermit crab essays”) to lists to straightforward chronologies, from segmented to not, from audio-visual to traditional print. The goal is to find a structure that feels organic to the material, that weaves story of experience together with story of thought, that enables you to develop a perspective you hadn’t had before and, in turn, to offer that satisfying glimpse through the surface of a subject to a moment of underlying truth that makes readers think, “Ah. That’s it. I see.”

Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited.

Michele Morano is the author of the travel memoir, Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, including The Normal School, Ninth Letter, Fourth Genre, and Best American Essays. She is professor and chair of the English Department at DePaul University in Chicago, where she teaches in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs.

Michele Morano
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Assay 5.1 (Fall 2018)

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