ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
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Tim Bascom
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this piece originally appeared in The Essay Review, 2013
A design professor from Denmark once drew a picture for me of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Here,” he said. “This is what it looks like”:
Aha, I thought, as we discussed parallels in the writing process. Although I may start an essay with a notion of where I am headed, inevitably I veer away as I get new ideas or encounter dead ends. Sometimes I even seem to go backwards, losing all direction.
Nothing is wasted, though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content. The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” No diagram matches the exact form that evolves, and that is because the best essayists resist predictable approaches. They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms that, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures could help an essay writer invent a more-personal, more-unique form. Here, then, are several main options.
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Narrative essays keep us engaged because we want answers to such questions. The tension begs for resolution. We keep on reading unless the writer stops stairstepping us upward toward that critical moment when change becomes necessary. If she flat-lines on an emotional plateau, not raising the tension, then we are likely to lose interest and walk away. “Readers do not want to put their foot on the same step twice,” is the way veteran essayist Bill Kittredge put it, while swapping ideas at a writing conference. He had learned this principle from screenwriters in Hollywood and insisted, “Think what you want, those guys know how plots work.”
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One interesting sidenote: trauma, which is a common source for personal essays, can easily cause an author to get stuck on the sort of plateau Kittredge described. Joann Beard, while clearly wrestling with the immobilizing impact of her own trauma, found a way to keep the reader moving forward and upward in her plot until the rising tension reached its inevitable climax: the graduate student firing his gun. I have seen less-experienced writers who, by contrast, seem to almost jog in place emotionally, such as a young Ugandan who asked me to critique his memoir-in-progress. While the story line showed promise in terms of sheer dramatic action, capturing intense moments from the Idi Amin era, it kept falling back onto the same emotional plane, clutching at a kind of post-traumatic scar tissue. It didn’t move upward enough, toward an anticipated change.
The Whorl of Reflection
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Set aside narrative, though, since it is not the only mode for a personal essay. In fact, most essays are more topical or reflective, which means they don’t move through time in a linear fashion like short stories.
By contrast, Philip Lopate describes how reflective essayists circle a subject, “wheeling and diving like a hawk.” They don’t write like academic scholars either, who begin with a thesis and aim it, arrow-like, at a pre-determined bull’s eye. Instead, personal essayists meander around their subject until arriving, often off to the side of what was expected. |
One of the benefits of such a circling approach is that it seems more organic, just like the mind’s creative process. It allows for a wider variety of perspectives also—illuminating the subject from multiple angles. A classic example would be Scott Russell Sanders’ essay about an alcoholic father, “Under the Influence.” Instead of luring us up the chronological slope of plot, Sanders spirals around his father’s drinking, letting it lead to a wide range of realizations about alcoholism: how it gets portrayed in films, how it compares to demon-possession in the Bible, how it results in violence in other families, how it raises a need for control inside himself, even how it influences the next generation through his workaholic over-compensation. We don’t read an essay like this out of plot-driven suspense so much as the pleasure of being surprised, again and again, by new perspective and new insight.
The Formal Limits of Focus
My own theory is that most personal essayists, because of a natural ability to extrapolate like Sanders, do not struggle to find something to write about. Writer’s block is not their problem, since their minds overflow with remembered experiences and related ideas. While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite—delete and delete. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. The essay is a figure locked in a too-large-lump-of-personal-experience, and the good essayist chisels away all unnecessary material.
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Certainly, one helpful way to understand this principle of deletion is to think of the essayist looking through a view finder to limit the reader’s focus. When the writer frames a selected portion of raw experience out of the chronological mess we call “life,” that fundamental act limits the reader’s attention to a manageable time and place, excluding all events that are not integrally related. What appears in the written “picture,” like any good painting, has wholeness because the essayist was disciplined enough to remove everything else.
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Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” is an odd but useful model. She limits that essay to a single evening walk in London, presumably to buy a pencil. I suspect Woolf gave herself permission to combine incidents from several walks in London, but no matter. It feels “brought together” by the imposed limits of time and place. As it happens, Woolf’s essay is also an interesting prototype for a kind of essay quite popular today: the segmented essay. Although the action is unified within a large frame of one set-apart evening stroll, it can also be seen as a combination of many individual framed moments. If we remove the supposed purpose of the journey—to find a pencil—it falls neatly into a set of discrete scenes with related reveries: a daydreaming lady witnessed through a window, a dwarfish woman trying on shoes, an imagined gathering of royalty on the other side of a palace wall, eventually the arguing of a married couple in a shop where Woolf gets her pencil.
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Today, many essayists are comfortable letting go of the overarching story line altogether—such as Woolf’s journey to buy a pencil—so that they can organize disparate scenes in a more segmented fashion, separated by bits of white space. All that remains to unify the parts is an almost imperceptible thread of theme, not narrative. Will Baker, for instance, relies on nothing but a title and section headings: “My Children Explain the Big Issues,” “Feminism,” “Fate,” “Existentialism,” “East and West.” Each of his framed vignettes is about a remembered moment with one of his kids. These moments have a broad similarity as a result; however, without their attached labels we would not be able to connect the parts in a fully satisfying manner. The titles allow us to string together a kind of thematic necklace.
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Dipping into the Well
Our attention to thematic unity brings up one more important dynamic in most personal essays. Not only do we have a horizontal movement through time but a vertical descent into meaning. As a result, essayists will often pause in their forward motion to dip into a thematic well.
Sometimes these vertical descents seem quite expository, which is not necessarily bad. Contrary to the oft-repeated maxim of high school writing teachers—“Show, don’t tell!”—the essayist is free to both show AND tell. In fact, I once heard the nonfiction writer Adam Hochschild scold a group of MFA students for being so subtle in their writing that they left out critical signposts that readers needed. “Don’t be so afraid to say what you mean,” he counseled.
Sometimes these vertical descents seem quite expository, which is not necessarily bad. Contrary to the oft-repeated maxim of high school writing teachers—“Show, don’t tell!”—the essayist is free to both show AND tell. In fact, I once heard the nonfiction writer Adam Hochschild scold a group of MFA students for being so subtle in their writing that they left out critical signposts that readers needed. “Don’t be so afraid to say what you mean,” he counseled.
Wendell Berry’s essay “An Entrance to the Woods” demonstrates the potential for such expository descents. In the middle of his quiet description of an overnight camping trip—he notices the distant roar of cars on a highway, and that “out-of-place” sound leads him on a long tangent. He describes how the “great ocean of silence” has been replaced by an ocean of engine noise, in which silence occurs only sporadically and at wide intervals. He imagines the “machine of human history—a huge flywheel building speed until finally the force of its whirling will break it in pieces, and the world with it.” And the reader realizes that what appeared to be an odd tangent is actually an essential descent into the well of meaning. The essay is not about hiking at all, but about the fragile nature of nature.
Handled in a like manner, Berry uses several of these loops of reflective commentary to develop a second layer to his essay. And though these loops seem to be digressions, temporarily pulling the reader away from the forward flow of the “plot,” they deliver essential underlying meaning.
Braided and Layered Structures
So far we have looked at narrative, reflective, and segmented essays, but we have not exhausted our structural possibilities. Far from it. Many essays, for instance, are braided, weaving together two or more strands of story-line in an interactive fashion. Judith Ortiz Cofer, in her personal meditation “Silent Dancing,” creates a particularly revelatory braid from two strands: a home movie juxtaposed against her own memories of childhood as a Puerto Rican in New Jersey. To help the reader with transitions, she brackets the home movie with white space, putting the text into italics. For awhile we look at the italicized home movie, then her memories, then the movie, and so on, letting one strand surface while the other is momentarily submerged.
Today, an even more common form is the lyric essay, which is not easily categorized, since it may depend on braiding or segmenting to accomplish its overall effect. However, like the lyric poem, the lyric essay is devoted more to image than idea, more to mood than concept. It is there to be experienced not simply thought about. And like many poems it accomplishes this effect by layering images without regard to narrative order. A lyric essay is a series of waves on the shore, cresting one after the other. It is one impression after another, unified by tone. And it seems to move in its own peculiar way, neither vertical nor horizontal. More slant. Want a book-length example? Read Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, which has a loose narrative superstructure but reads like an extended prose poem or a group of poems moving toward a cumulative effect. To read Ondaatje’s prose is to fall into it and swim, or nearly drown, like the narrator’s own grandmother does. It is not just an intellectual exercise but a visceral encounter, more intuitive than rational.
Coming Full Circle
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Regardless of form, all essays must end eventually, which raises a final worthwhile question: how to bring closure?
First of all, endings are related to beginnings. That’s why many essays seem to circle back to where they began. Annie Dillard, in her widely anthologized piece “Living Like Weasels,” opens with a dried out weasel skull that is attached, like a pendant, to the throat of a living eagle—a macabre proof that the weasel was carried aloft to die and be torn apart. Then, at the end of the essay, Dillard alludes to that skull again, stating, “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.” Of course, the effect of returning to her initial image, transforming it into a symbol, is, a sense of completion. |
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However, for Dillard’s weasel-skull conclusion to feel truly satisfying, it must mimic life, which is never completely complete. In real life, there is always an “and then,” even if it comes after we have died. So the best conclusions will open up a bit at the end, suggesting the presence of the future.
See how deftly Dillard accomplishes this effect simply by positing one last imagined or theoretical possibility—a way of life she hopes to master, that we ourselves might master: “Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.” |
Yes, the essay has come full circle, but it points away, beyond itself, to something yet to be realized. The ending both closes and opens at the same time!
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Tim Bascom’s newest book–The Boundless Game—celebrates ways that soccer transcends cultural and national borders. Bascom, who received his MFA from the University of Iowa, is author of a previous novel, a collection of short fiction, two collections of essays, and two prize-winning memoirs about years spent in East Africa as a youth. His shorter prose pieces have been selected for Best Creative Nonfiction and Best American Travel Writing, also winning the Briar Cliff Fiction Prize. Bascom is former director of the annual Kansas Book Festival.
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