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Innovative Forms: The Wide Variety of Creative Nonfiction

I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness. My ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance . . . I love the poetic gait, by leaps and gambols.

—MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

I find myself thumbing through an encyclopedia of Jewish religion I happened to pick up at the library. As I turn the pages of this marvelous book, I’m struck by how little I, a Jewish woman who went to Hebrew school for most of my formative years, know about my own religion. I start writing down the quotes that interest me most, facts about the Kabbalah and ritual baths and dybbuks and the Tree of Life. I’ve also started noodling around with some other stories: a recent trip to Portugal and the news I received there of my mother’s emergency hysterectomy; notes on the volunteer work I perform at the local children’s hospital; and musings about my on-again, off-again yoga practice. As I keep all these windows open on my computer, the voice of the encyclopedia emerges as an odd, binding thread, holding together these disparate stories in a way that seems organic. I begin to fragment the stories and to move these fragments around, finding the images that resonate against one another in juxtaposition.

I feel like a poet, creating stanzas and listening for the rhythms of the sentence, using white space, reading aloud to determine when another quote from the encyclopedia is necessary to balance out my personal story. Sometimes I have to throw out whole sections that no longer fit, but this editing leaves room for new segments, new phrases, new images that build and transform over the course of the essay, weaving in and out, but always grounded on the thread of prayer and the body. It takes some time, this shuffling gait, but finally I have an essay, “Basha Leah”: a spiritual self-portrait in the form of a complex braid.

This lyric essay allows for the moments of pause, the gaps, the silence. The fragmentation feels correct to the piece: it allows for the moments of “not knowing,” the unspoken words that seem truer than anything I could ever say aloud.

—BRENDA

Creative nonfiction has seen an explosion of experimentation in the last two decades, along with attempts to define what these new modes can accomplish. Of course, forms are rarely truly new. What we see now is greater formal diversity, and a reaching for language with which to discuss it. As we identify modes like flash nonfiction, collage, and the hermit crab essay, we teach ourselves how to understand texts we love, and how to use those formal innovations to enhance our own work.

However, these categories are not clear-cut. A critic could argue, rightly, that the lyric essay is inherently a hybrid form. Cross-genre, hybrid, and other categories overlap, and one person’s hybrid might be another’s collage. The experimentation behind all these categories is rich and exciting. We hope to give you the tools to create your own innovative works.

What Is the Lyric Essay?

Lyric. Essay. How do these two terms fit together? At first these words may seem diametrically opposed. Lyric implies a poetic sensibility concerned more with language, imagery, sound, and rhythm over the more linear demands of narrative. Essay, on the other hand, implies a more logical frame of mind, one concerned with a well-wrought story or a finely tuned argument, over the demands of language. When we put the two together, we come up with a hybrid form that allows for the best of both genres.

To put it simply, lyric essays do not necessarily follow a straight narrative line. The root of the word lyric is the lyre, a musical instrument that accompanied ancient song. Lyric poetry and essays are songlike in that they hinge on the inherent rhythms of language and sound. Lyric essays favor fragmentation and imagery; they use white space and juxtaposition as structural elements. They are as attuned to silences as they are to utterance. In its thirtieth-anniversary issue devoted to lyric essays, Seneca Review characterized them as having “this built-in mechanism for provoking meditation. They require us to complete their meaning.”

The writer of the lyric essay brings the reader into an arena where questions are asked; it is up to the reader to piece together possible answers and interpretations. Fragmentation allows for this type of reader interaction because the writer, by surrendering to the fragmented form, declines a foregone conclusion. Writer and literary theorist Rebecca Faery notes, “In the essays that have in recent years compelled me most, I am summoned, called upon. These essays are choral, polyphonic; there are pauses, rests. . . . The rests in these essays are spaces inviting me in, inviting response.”

The lyric essay requires an allegiance to intuition. Because we are no longer tied to a logical, linear narrative or argument, we must surrender to the writing process itself to show us the essay’s intent. In so doing, we reveal ourselves in a roundabout way. When we write in the mode of the lyric essay, we create not only prose pieces but a portrait of our subconscious selves, the part of us that speaks in riddles or in brief, imagistic flashes.

Part of the fun of the lyric essay will be making up your own form as you go along. But for the sake of argument, we will break the lyric essay down into categories that seem to encapsulate the lyric essays we see most often: flash nonfiction (with a subset we call the micro essay), collage, the braided essay, the “hermit crab” essay, and a structure we’re calling the “nonce” form.

Flash Nonfiction

William Wordsworth’s poem “Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room” celebrates the joys of the sonnet form, which he describes as the joys of working in small spaces—a sonnet has just fourteen lines. Such compression offers a relief from the heavy lifting required by a longer work, which Wordsworth describes as “the weight of too much liberty.”

Flash nonfiction is a brief essay—usually a thousand words or less—that illuminates in a quick flash of light. It is tightly focused with no extraneous words, and it mines its images in ways that create metaphorical significance. The language is fresh, surprising, hinged on the workings of the imagination.

This form is a wonderful challenge to both write and read. The popular online magazine Brevity “publishes concise literary nonfiction of 750 words or fewer focusing on detail and scene over thought and opinion.” This journal is an excellent place to find scores of diverse examples of the flash form—some that read like compressed narrative, and others that blur the line between prose and poetry. One such piece is A. Papatya Bucak’s very short essay “I Cannot Explain My Fear.” In it, Bucak lists fears, sometimes expanding for a line or two, but remaining in the rhythm of a list. It begins:

Fear of bears, fear of ladders, fear of freezing. Once, in the Sonoran Desert, I woke with ice on my sleeping bag. Fear of a cancerous thyroid; fear of eating poisonous fish from Japan; fear of sharks, overly large seals and sea lice, too. Fear that my glasses are radioactive because the first time I had a nuclear scan the technician didn’t tell me to remove them, but the second time he did. Fear of swimming to the bottom of the pool because people get suctioned to the filter and drown.

Bucak continues in this rhythm until the end, as the piece slows down, takes some breaths, begins new ways of listing, and approaches things the narrator does not fear:

Once I saw a coyote standing on the stump of a tree in a farmer’s field. Once I saw three bald eagles at once. Once I saw a snake with the leg of a frog sticking out of its mouth.

In this short piece, Bucak manages to create an inner self-portrait that relies wholly on imagery. Like a poem, this essay asks us to enter this world and make our own meanings.

Of course, success within a few pages will not look like success at a dozen pages. Strong flash nonfiction depends on recognizing the demands of this form. Lengthy description, exquisite scene-setting, and lots of backstory will quickly take you past your word count. Here are some tips for working effectively in brief nonfiction.

•   A strong title. Your title needs to be powerful on its own and to add something substantial to your piece. Don’t use a title that just sums up what the rest of the piece will do. Find one that adds to the reader’s experience of the essay and gives its own spark of illumination.

•   As you go small, think smaller. As with a poem, every word and every image needs to earn its space in flash. A single metaphor can make or break a brief essay. Wordplay becomes crucial in shorter spaces, and, surprisingly, shorter works can often bear more repetition than longer ones, as Bucak’s “fear” recurs and becomes almost a poem or a chant.

•   Stay close. You generally can’t wander far from one thought or one scene in a flash essay.

•   Let your ending pack a punch. With shorter work, we have a tendency to “read forward.” We want to see where this quick ride will take us, rather than sinking into the movements of it, as we do in longer essays. Be sure your ending reflects powerfully on what has come before.

The Micro Essay

The micro essay is even shorter than traditional flash. At its best, the micro essay provides the crack of illumination certain phrases do, such as Franklin Roosevelt’s “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” or John Kennedy’s “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Most of us can’t forget these words, even if we don’t recall their historical context. A strong short piece can glow with the same brightness.

The field of the micro essay grows, with more and more identified lengths—and names for them—popping up. Nanos are three hundred words; drabbles, one hundred; dribbles, fifty. The online journal Six-Word Memoirs publishes just that: six-word nonfictions that contain a meaningful nugget of narrative. (The inspiration for the six-word memoir comes from Ernest Hemingway’s six-word story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) An example of this tiny form, from Six-Word: “He called me goddess, then, Gladys.”

To succeed, the micro essay must do what the flash piece does, with even more compression. That verbal lightning has just seconds to reveal its world. Look at Michelle Ross’s “Cubist Mother,” a micro essay clocking in at just one hundred words. Eight sentences long, “Cubist Mother” focuses on a vivid scene.

When I found my mother throwing dishes at the mortar wall behind our house, she said only, “I forgot these once belonged to my mother.” In her hand was the pale blue dish, speckled like a bird’s egg. Once upon a time, I’d stamped my feet if anyone else ate from it. Watching my mother hurl that dish, I thought of that Duchamp painting, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. The curves of the figure’s hips and buttocks, the metronomic swing of her legs and arms—all multiplied. Or is she disassembled? Shattered like a dish thrown against a wall.

Note how careful this writing is. The first sentences begin with introductory clauses. “When,” “In,” “Once,” and “Watching” lead into sentences that land hard on crucial details: the dishes the mother smashes were her own mother’s; they are like eggs, and therefore delicate; the figure of her mother reminds the speaker of a Cubist painting, a disrupted body. The last three sentences change the pattern, with an abrupt dash clause, a question, and finally a sentence fragment, as if the prose enacts the mother’s falling apart (see Chapter 12, “The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form,” for more on performative sentences). The title connects the mother’s identity with the painting, and the ending ties the fate of the dishes with that of the mother.

Collage

Do you remember, as a child, making collages out of photographs, images cut from magazines, bits and pieces of text gathered from ticket stubs, documents, or newspaper headlines? Often, these mosaics represented the self in a way that no other form could quite accomplish.

The collage essay works in the same way. It brings together many different fragments and assembles them so they create something wholly new. Juxtaposition becomes the key craft element here. One cannot simply throw these pieces down haphazardly; they must be carefully selected because of how they will resonate off one another. You must listen for the echoes, the repetitions, the way one image organically suggests the next.

The writer must also provide some kind of grounding structure for the reader to hold on to. Going back to those collages you made as a child, they would be useless collections of fragments without the poster board and glue used to hold the pieces in place. The supporting architecture for a collage essay can take the form of numbered sections, or it can be subtitles that guide the reader along. Or the structure may be as subtle as asterisks delineating the white space between sections. The title, subtitles, or an epigraph (opening quote) can all provide a hint of direction for the reader.

For example, in her famous essay about the sixties, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion uses a collage structure to mimic the disorienting atmosphere of that era in San Francisco. Alluding to the Yeats poem “The Second Coming,” from which her title derives, she begins:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. . . . People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

Starting off with a declarative sentence that telegraphs both theme and form, the essay then proceeds in many sections separated by white space. The structure employs posters seen on the streets, casual conversations, immersion in an apartment where a group is dropping LSD, and so on. Didion, after this first introductory section, does not directly comment upon anything she sees; her point of view is evident from what she chooses to include and how she juxtaposes the sections. The reader puts it all together.

A collage can also be done within a single short essay, without the use of white space, numbers, or other sectioning devices. Take a look at Ira Sukrungruang’s short essay “Because, the Ferguson Verdict” (see Anthology). He uses a repeating word, because (this kind of move is called anaphora), to list the ways he is personally affected by events occurring in the larger world.

Collage can also extend beyond the essay into book-length forms. For example, Bluets, by Maggie Nelson, is an extended meditation on the color blue structured by short, numbered sections, small snippets that move in an associative way from one to the next. It begins:

1.   Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession; suppose I shredded my napkin as we spoke. . . .

2.   And so I fell in love with a color—in this case, the color blue—as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.

This book begins in supposition (“Suppose . . .”) then proceeds to meditate on this premise for 240 sections, using her own words, words from correspondence, quotes from research, and so on. Nelson ends the book with dates, “(2003–2006),” indicating the way she allowed plenty of time and space for this collage to fall into place.

Another word for a collage essay is the “paratactic” essay, which means to place things side by side. Carl Klaus, in his book The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, describes paratactic as “juxtaposing discrete sentences, paragraphs, and larger units of discourse.” He reminds us that this type of rhetorical style is nothing new; authors from Montaigne, to George Orwell, to E. B. White often used this structure to great effect.

The Braided Essay

On the Jewish Sabbath, we eat a bread called challah, a braided egg bread that gleams on its special platter. The braided strands weave in and out of one another, creating a pattern that is both beautiful and appetizing. We eat a special bread on the Sabbath because this day has been set aside as sacred; the smallest acts must be differentiated from everyday motions.

The braided challah is a fitting symbol for an essay form closely allied with collage: the braided essay. In this form, you fragment your piece into separate strands that repeat and continue throughout the essay. There is a sense of weaving about it—of interruption and continuation—like the braiding of bread or of hair. (See “A Braided Heart: Shaping the Lyric Essay” by Brenda Miller on the Tell It Slant website.)

For example, take a look at “On Touching Ground” by Jericho Parms (see Anthology). She braids several different strands: her experience in the gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at a horse sculpture by Degas; memories of horses, especially with her grandfather; research on wild mustangs and on the way horses run; research on another artist, Eadweard Muybridge; memories of home; and observations and research on other works by Degas. The structure works a bit differently than a collage essay, because these threads reappear in substantial sections, echoing one another.

As you see in this essay, the braided form allows a way for research and outside voices to intertwine with one’s own voice and experience. When you write a braided essay, find at least one outside voice that will shadow your own; in this way the essay gains texture and substance.

Another well-known example is “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard. Spurred by her experience of a mass shooting at her workplace, the essay is anchored by this central, narrative plot line. But three other strands also propel the essay forward: her dying collie, her recent divorce, and squirrels inhabiting her attic. All these stories weave and intersect; while we might not understand how they’re all connected at first, the essay uses strong scenes, imagery, and metaphor to bring them all together in the end. It becomes a heartbreaking piece about loss of all kinds, something that would have been more difficult to do if she had focused solely on the unfolding tragedy.

The “Hermit Crab” Essay

Where we—Suzanne and Brenda—live, in the Pacific Northwest, there’s a beautiful place called Deception Pass. Deception Pass is prone to extreme tides, and in the tide pools you can often find hermit crabs skulking about. They look a little like cartoon characters, hiding inside a shell, lifting up that shell to take it with them when they go for cover. They move a few inches, then crouch down and stop, becoming only a shell again.

A hermit crab is a strange animal, born without the armor to protect its soft, exposed abdomen. And so it spends its life occupying the empty, often beautiful, shells left behind by snails or other mollusks. It reanimates these shells, making of them a strange, new hybrid creature that has its own particular beauty, its own way of moving through the tide pools and among the rocks. Each one will be slightly different, depending on the type of shell it decides to inhabit.

In honor of these wonderful creatures, we’ve dubbed a particular form of lyric essay the “hermit crab” essay. This kind of essay appropriates existing forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly. It is an essay that deals with material that seems born without its own carapace—material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it.

The “shells” come where you can find them, anywhere out in the world. They may borrow from fiction and poetry, but they also don’t hesitate to armor themselves in more mundane structures, such as the descriptions in a mail-order catalog or the entries in a checkbook register.

For example, in her short story “How to Become a Writer,” Lorrie Moore appropriates the form of the how-to article to tell a personal narrative. The voice of the narrator catches the cadence of instructional manuals, but at the same time winks at the reader. Of course these are not impersonal instructions but a way of telling her own story. And by using the literary second person, the reader is unwittingly drawn along into the place of the narrator and a natural interaction develops:

First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age—say, fourteen. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at fifteen you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire.

Though “How to Become a Writer” is presented as fiction, the story can act as a fine model for innovative lyric essays in the how-to mode. What are the aspects of your life that you could render in how-to form? How will the second-person address enable you to achieve some distance from the material and thus some perspective? These types of essays can be quite fun to write; the voice takes over and creates its own momentum.

Take a look at “Math 1619” by Gwendolyn Wallace (see Anthology). Wallace wrote this essay while still a senior in high school, and by appropriating the form of math problems, she is able to tell a powerful story about what it is like to be a marginalized student. She sets up the form with a voice we’d expect to hear, and then quickly deviates from that voice to show that she is telling her own story. The essay begins:

Show all of your work clearly and thoroughly. You may use an approved calculator, but the use of a tablet is not permitted. Once you have completed the problems, hand your test to the white man seated at the front of the classroom.

Note how the essay pretends to be a standard math test in the first two lines, using the objective, bland voice of instructions. But by the time we reach the end of the third line, we are cued in to the fact that this essay will unfold as a personal story centered on race. The essay then proceeds in a series of math test problems, including the forms of multiple choice, graphs, and word problems, all telling specific stories about Wallace’s experiences. By containing her personal story in this quiz form, Wallace not only creates a unique essay that effectively conveys difficult content, she also shows that this subject does not come with easy answers.

In a hermit crab essay, you can decide how deeply you want to use the form. On one end of the spectrum, you can fully inhabit the voice of the form, as Wallace does in her essay, or you could simply use the form as a way to structure your piece (a more formal way of making a collage or braided essay). For example, in her essay “The Pain Scale,” Eula Biss uses the form of the pain scale—which attempts to measure one’s pain on a scale of 0 to 10—as a way to structure a highly complex piece that explores not only the nature of pain, but the many different ways we try to measure the immeasurable.

Often when you write in these forms, you’ll find yourself writing about memories and topics you never thought you would approach. It can often be a way to break through resistance, because your conscious mind will be occupied with the form itself. The form can then lead to what we like to call “inadvertent revelations,” where it seems as though the essay is revealing unexpected insights, not the writer.

For example, one of our students had trouble writing about growing up with a mother who suffered from a hoarding disorder. This student grew up in complete chaos, and her writing had been too chaotic to make sense. When she decided to write her story in the form of a real estate ad—with the chipper voice of the ad revealing the horrifying state of the house—she created a powerful story with a great deal of compassionate perspective.

Some writers have successfully extended the hermit crab essay into book-length form. In 2005, Amy Krouse Rosenthal published Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life in the alphabetical form of an encyclopedia, and followed up years later with Textbook, which is sectioned into various school topics, such as Social Studies, Geography, Midterm Exam, and so on. Within these sections she uses assessments, graphs, visual images, and even a literal texting component: she invites readers to text her with different comments or pictures along the way. In this way, her form highlights the interactive nature of these innovative works.

As you try your own hermit crab forms, you may find the process quite fun; a spirit of playfulness can underlie even the most serious of these essays. But it can also be difficult to know how to pull off a successful hermit crab essay without it becoming mere gimmick. Here are some areas to pay particular attention to in these forms:

•   Beginnings: How can you announce the form early on, and create a strong introduction? How can you start small and build intensity from there?

•   Specific scenes: How can you allow your own story to unfold within the form? How can you choose and suspend key moments that will deepen the essay? Where should those moments come?

•   Find the bigger theme: How can the essay transcend your personal experience and express a larger idea or universal emotion?

•   Endings: Many people have trouble ending their essays. Allow the form to give you a natural endpoint, if possible. Or keep in mind the main theme you want to express; how can the ending scene bring forth that theme most strongly?

The Nonce Form

More than one thousand years ago, a Japanese writer and member of the court, Sei Shōnagon, began to write her experiences in the form of lists. Shōnagon was not a narrative writer. She did not tell stories, though her lists hint at them. Mostly, Shōnagon thought in categories, such as “Hateful Things,” “Adorable Things,” and so on: she had many list headings, and these guided her content. At times we love Shōnagon for cracking open with precision a different era, as in “Hateful Things,” when she complains about a hair “rubbing one’s inkstick . . . making a nasty, grating sound.” Often Shōnagon is timeless, as when she complains of someone who “discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.”

Shōnagon’s lists, with their guiding titles, give us an example of a writer innovating a form to best accommodate her particular gift. In poetry, such a creation is called a nonce form. Authors create nonce forms for a specific work, though subsequent writers may borrow and adapt the form, as many writers have built on Shōnagon’s lists. We are taking this term from poetry and introducing the nonce essay.

Nonce forms overlap at times with hermit crabs, but with the difference that in the nonce form, the author is not mining a pre-existing form, like the pain scale, for its inherent meaning. Rather, the nonce author tries to find the perfect formal vehicle, as Shōnagon used lists to capture her associative thinking.

In his essay “Michael Martone’s Leftover Water,” Patrick Madden nabs a bottle of Dasani water partially drunk by the writer Michael Martone and auctions it off on eBay. He encourages others to use the “Ask the Seller” function to pose questions during the sale, and uses the questions and answers as a structure:

Q: I’d like to inquire about the safety of this product . . . ? Apr-01-09
A: You are hoping, perhaps, to catch some of what he has? Some of that “benign neurosis” (to borrow a phrase from George Higgins) called “writing”?

This essay uses eBay—and the long piece of narrative leading up to it—not as a borrowed form, but as a nonce vehicle: to generate random questions for the author to answer, to perform the provocation of selling a well-known writer’s used water bottle (it sells for around $20). The form becomes a commentary on fame and the possibilities of “catching” literary talent.

Graphic Memoir

Writers create these memoirs, also called “autobiographical comics,” in comic book panels, a form that allows us to read on many different levels. The visual story often complements the written story, but can also contradict it or comment upon it in original ways. Take a look at “Perdition” by Kristen Radtke (see Anthology). In this short graphic memoir, the style of the images, the shading, the framing all contribute to the feeling we get from this autobiographical piece.

The Pulitzer Prize–winning books Maus I and Maus II, by Art Spiegelman, took on the challenging material of Holocaust survival and framed it in the images of Jews as mice, Germans as cats, and Poles as pigs. Throughout, we see the narrator, Artie, struggling with how to portray his father’s story as a Holocaust survivor, while at the same time telling his own story of what it’s like to be the child of a survivor. This “meta” narrative—the writing behind the writing—threads throughout the books, with images breaking through their frames, being erased and reenvisioned as new information comes to light.

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic tells the story of the author’s complex relationship to her father, a relationship that was mired in secrets. Salon magazine said: “Bechdel’s years of drawing a serial comic strip have honed her ability to convey oceans of feeling in a single image, and the feelings are never simple; Fun Home shimmers with regret, compassion, annoyance, frustration, pity and love.” The graphic elements become crucial in understanding not only the story, but the narrator’s evolving perspective and point of view.

While we don’t all have the talent and training to write a graphic memoir, it could be useful to look to this form as a model for how we might be able to “convey an ocean of feeling in a single image.” You could envision a traditional narrative as a comic strip and allow this visualization to help you home in on the key details, scenes, and gestures that are necessary to bring your story to life. Or you might collaborate with a talented artist who could envision even a small part of your work in the complexities of visual language.

TRY IT

1.   Write an essay that has fewer than five hundred words. Give yourself a time limit—a half hour, say—and write about one image that comes to mind or an image that has stayed in your memory from the last couple of days. Use vivid, concrete details. Do not explain the image to us but allow it to evolve into metaphor. If you are stuck, open a book of poetry and write down the first line you see as an epigraph (an opening quote). Write an essay using the epigraph as a starting point for either form or content or imagery. If you write more than five hundred words (about two pages), you must trim and cut to stay under the limit. Find what is essential.

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Each person brings in a line of poetry as an epigraph and offers it to a partner. Write for fifteen minutes, and then pass this epigraph to the next person. Write again for fifteen minutes. Continue this process for as long as you like. Try shaping one of these experiments into a complete essay of fewer than five hundred words.

2.   Choose an even more limited word count—fifty, one hundred, three hundred words—and force yourself to write to that exact number. It’s remarkable how, as Wordsworth noted, restrictions can become liberating. Aim your piece at a specific journal. Publishing venues for the micro essay continue to grow. The journal Nano publishes, guessably, nanos. Creative Nonfiction, one of the first journals to focus on literary nonfiction, publishes essays called Tiny Truths, delivered on the platforms of Twitter or Instagram. There are many other publications open to or specializing in micro essays.

3.   Begin a piece by imitating Bucak’s “I Cannot Explain My Fear.” You can list fears, or loves, or jealousies, or any kind of emotion at all, transforming that emotion into a concrete list that reveals some narrative about your life. Try to do this in three hundred words.

4.   If you have an essay you feel may be overly wordy, force yourself to remove half of the word count, distilling each part of it down to its essential elements. Then do this refining again. It’s surprising how much verbal padding we can remove, reducing that essay to its molten core. See if you can incorporate this distillation into a revision.

5.   Look at a book that operates through micro-essay lengths, such as Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. List the connections between the pieces of her book, as well as the leaps she makes between segments. Take an essay you are unhappy with and try this strategy of creating micro length building blocks, loosely associated, and forming out of them a whole.

6.   Go back to one of your own pieces and turn it into fragments. Take a pair of scissors to it and cut it up into at least three different sections. Move these around, eliminating what no longer fits, juxtaposing the different sections in various ways. How can you make use of white space? How can you let the images do the talking for you?

7.   Wander the streets of your town looking for random objects. Gather as many of these as you like, then bring them back to your desk and start arranging them in a way that is artistically pleasing. Then write for several minutes on each object and see if you can create a fragmented essay that juxtaposes these elements in the same way.

VARIATION FOR A GROUP: Go out and gather objects individually, but come back together as a group to sift through the pile. Use each other’s objects to create three-dimensional collages. Then write for one hour to create a collage essay using these objects as a guide.

8.   Experiment with transitions and juxtaposition. Find one image to repeat in the essay from start to finish, but transform this image in some way so that it has taken on new characteristics by the end of the collage essay.

9.   Go back to an essay that’s been giving you problems. Look for the one image that seems to encapsulate the abstract ideas or concepts you’re trying to develop. Find at least one outside source that will provide new information and details for you. Explode the essay into at least three different strands, each focused on different aspects of that image, and begin weaving.

10.   Write an essay in the form of a how-to guide using the second-person voice. You can turn anything into a how-to. In Lorrie Moore’s book Self-Help, she has stories titled “How to Talk to Your Mother” and “How to Be the Other Woman.”

11.   Brainstorm a list of all the forms in the outer world that you could use as a hermit crab essay model. The possibilities are endless. Choose one of these forms and begin writing content suggested by the form. For example, Brenda wrote a hermit crab essay called “We Regret to Inform You” using the form of the standard rejection note as her shell. The form suggested the content, not the other way around. Let the word choices and tone of your shell dictate your approach to the topic.

12.   Write a list of the topics/issues in your life that are “forbidden,” the things you could never write about. You could write a list using a repeating phrase such as: “I could never write about . . .” or “I’m afraid to write about. . . .” Choose one of these, and then begin to contain it in a hermit crab form. (Or maybe the list, itself, will create its own lyric essay!)

13.   Create a nonce form. Consider using forms from poetry, like the villanelle, or other arts (Desirae Matherly’s “Solo” uses sections of one hundred and thirty words to match the number of Bach’s measures in the musical form called the fugue.) Consider how your essay wants to move, whether associatively, through questions and answers, and so on, and look for forms that might contain this movement.

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

•   “Of Smells” by Michel de Montaigne

•   “On Touching Ground” by Jericho Parms

•   “Perdition” by Kristen Radtke

•   “Because, the Ferguson Verdict” by Ira Sukrungruang

•   “Math 1619” by Gwendolyn Wallace

Resources Available Online

•   “The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard

•   Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

•   “I Cannot Explain My Fear” by A. Papatya Bucak

•   “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Joan Didion

•   “Michael Martone’s Leftover Water” by Patrick Madden

•   “A Braided Heart” by Brenda Miller

•   “Cubist Mother” by Michelle Ross

•   Six-Word Memoirs

•   Tiny Truths in Creative Nonfiction

Print Resources

•   The Shell Game: Writers Play with Borrowed Forms, edited by Kim Adrian

•   Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

•   The Spirit of Disruption: Landmark Essays from The Normal School, edited by Steven Church

•   The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata

•   We Might as Well Call It the Lyric Essay, edited by John D’Agata

•   Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

•   Textbook by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

•   “Basha Leah” by Brenda Miller in Season of the Body

•   “We Regret to Inform You” by Brenda Miller in An Earlier Life

•   Bluets by Maggie Nelson

•   Between Song and Story: Essays from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret Whitford

•   Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker

•   Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale—My Father Bleeds History and Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale—And Here My Troubles Began by Art Spiegelman