12

The Basics of Good Writing in Any Form

I was delighted to find that nonfiction prose can also carry meaning in its structures and, like poetry, can tolerate all sorts of figurative language, as well as alliteration and even rhyme. The range of rhythms in prose is larger and grander than it is in poetry, and it can handle discursive ideas and plain information as well as character and story. It can do everything. I felt as though I had switched from a single reed instrument to a full orchestra.

—ANNIE DILLARD

I am working with a group of novice nonfiction writers, and we’re about two-thirds of the way through our time together. My students have plumbed their lives in ways they never thought possible: as environmental records, as living history, as a movement through various forms—scientific, spiritual, cultural, aesthetic—of inquiry. They sort themselves through the door of my classroom with varying degrees of eagerness and pull out their notebooks, pens cocked and waiting. They’re used to coming in and interrogating themselves in different ways: Who are they really? How have they lived?

Today, however, I know I’m going to make them groan. Instead of prompts like writing about the latest election or a probing of an early memory, I have them pull out a piece of their own prose and count the number of words in each sentence for three paragraphs. I also have them jot down comments on the kinds of sentences they use: simple declarative (basic subject-verb), complex, fragmented, and so forth. They do the assignment, because it would be even more boring to sit and do nothing, I suppose. Suddenly a little exclamation breaks out from a corner of the room.

“Ohmigod!” says one young woman. “All of my sentences are eleven words long!”

This woman has been concerned about what feels to her like a flatness or lifelessness to her prose. Here, in one rather mechanical but not painful exercise, she’s put her finger on the reason, or one of the reasons. On further analysis she discovers that she has a penchant for writing one simple declarative sentence after another: “I drive to the forest in April. My car is almost ready for a new clutch. The forests are quiet at that time of year.” The metronomic beat of same sentence structure, same sentence length, has robbed her otherwise sparkling essays of their life.

For the sake of comparison, listen to the difference created in those three sample sentences by a little more rhetorical inventiveness: “In April, a quiet time of year, I drive to the forest. My car almost ready for a new clutch.”

—SUZANNE

Scene and Exposition

Generally speaking, scene is the building block of creative nonfiction. There are exceptions to this statement—more academic or technically oriented writing, the essay of ideas perhaps—but overall, the widespread notion that nonfiction is the writer’s thoughts presented in an expository or summarizing way has done little but produce quantities of unreadable nonfiction. Scene is based on action unreeling before us, as it would in a film, and it will draw on the same techniques as fiction—dialogue, description, point of view, specificity, concrete detail. Scene also encompasses the lyricism and imagery of great poetry.

Let’s begin by defining our terms. Expository writing, as the term implies, exposes the author’s thoughts or experiences for the reader; it summarizes, generally with little or no sensory detail. Expository writing compresses time: For five years I lived in Alaska. It presents a compact summation of an experience with no effort to recreate the experience for the person reading.

On the other hand, scene, as in fiction, uses detail and sensory information to recreate experience, generally with location, action, a sense of movement through time, and possible dialogue. Scene is cinematic. Here is a possible reworking of the preceding sentence, using scene: For the five years I lived in Alaska I awoke each morning to the freezing seat of the outhouse, the sting of hot strong coffee drunk without precious sugar or milk, the ringing “G’day!” of my Australian neighbor.

The latter version of this sentence clearly presents the reader with a more experiential version of that time in Alaska, with details that provide a snapshot of the place: the slowness of time passing is stressed by the harsh routine of the coffee and outhouse; we get a sense of scarcity of supply; the neighbor even has a bit of swift characterization. Of course, for an essay in which Alaska is totally unimportant the expository summation might be the better move. But if you find yourself writing nonfiction with very little scene, you are likely to produce flat writing readers have to struggle to enter.

In his essay “The Knife,” author and surgeon Richard Selzer moves fluidly between scene and exposition; Selzer forces us to live the awesome power and responsibility of the surgeon before allowing himself the luxury of meditating about it.

There is a hush in the room. Speech stops. The hands of the others, assistants and nurses, are still. Only the voice of the patient’s respiration remains. It is the rhythm of a quiet sea, the sound of waiting. Then you speak, slowly, the terse entries of a Himalayan climber reporting back. “The stomach is okay. Greater curvature clean. No sign of ulcer. Pylorus, duodenum fine. Now comes the gall-bladder. No stones. Right kidney, left, all right. Liver . . . uh-oh.”

Selzer goes on to tell us he finds three large tumors in the liver. “Three big hard ones in the left lobe, one on the right. Metastatic deposits. Bad, bad.” Like fine fiction, this passage contains a clear setting—the hospital room, characterized appropriately enough by sound rather than appearance: the silence of life and death. There is action mimicking real time, containing the element of surprise. We learn along with the surgeon about the patient’s metastasized cancer. There’s dialogue, as the surgeon narrates to himself, to his surgical assistants, seemingly to the fates, his discovery of the patient’s mortality. And like fine poetry, this piece of writing also organizes itself through imagery: the “quiet sea” of the passive patient’s breathing versus the labored voice—like a “Himalayan climber’s”—of the surgeon emphasizes the former’s loss of control.

Selzer’s passage would be easy to change to an expository sentence: Often in surgery I found unexpected cancer. But the author’s final purpose—an extended meditation on the relationship of human and tool, soul and body—would fall flat. The reader, lacking any feel for the grandeur and potential tragedy of exploring the body, would dismiss expository statements such as, “The surgeon struggles not to feel. It is suffocating to press the feeling out,” as merely odd or grandiose.

Representative and Specific Scenes

There are several other moves worth noting in Selzer’s passage. Like the sample Alaska sentence given previously, Selzer’s surgical description is a representative scene. In other words, he doesn’t pretend this operation occurs at one specific time and place, but it represents a typical surgical procedure, one among many.

In contrast, here’s an example of a specific, not representative, scene, from Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” The scenes comprising the essay all occur at specific moments in time. Here is Beard at work, with her physicist colleagues having a professional discussion around the chalkboard:

“If it’s plasma, make it in red,” I suggest helpfully. We’re all smoking illegally, in the journal office with the door closed and the window open. We’re having a plasma party.

“We aren’t discussing plasma,” Bob says condescendingly. He’s smoking a horrendously smelly pipe. The longer he stays in here the more it feels like I’m breathing small daggers in through my nose. He and I don’t get along; each of us thinks the other needs to be taken down a peg. Once we had a hissing match in the hallway which ended with him suggesting that I could be fired, which drove me to tell him he was already fired, and both of us stomped into our offices and slammed our doors.

“I had to fire Bob,” I tell Chris later.

“I heard,” he says noncommittally. Bob is his best friend.

This is a pinpointed event, not representative but presumably unlike any other moment in Beard’s life. Notice how much suggestive detail Beard packs into a short space. These characters break rules, argue, and exist in complex relationship to one another. Her relationship with Bob is established in this scene—a relationship that seems suffused with a genuine but relatively harmless tension, given their ability to issue dire threats to each other without consequence. The dialogue sounds real and secures the characters, capturing the nuanced pretense of Bob’s stressing the “plas” part of the “plasma.” Chris, the man in the middle, seems to have heard all this bickering before.

We all tend to use too little scene in creative nonfiction. We especially forget the possibilities of representative scene. Even when we’re reporting a typical rather than a specific event, use of scenic elements, as in Selzer’s surgery, conveys a sense of character and situation far more effectively than does summary.

Remember those “shocks of memory” from Chapter 1? Go back and see how the examples in that chapter use both specific and representative scenes to stay focused on a particular moment in time. They rarely summarize or skim over these moments; they have the patience to keep looking. Or study a particular essay in the Anthology, identifying representative scenes, specific scenes, and exposition. This will be good practice for your own writing.

Specificity and Detail

Scene forces us to use specificity and detail, elements that get lost in the quick wash of exposition. Even in discussing the largest ideas, our brains engage with the small workings of the senses first. And the specificity of a piece of nonfiction is generally where the sensory details lie: the aroma of honeysuckle, the weak film of moonlight. While it is possible to go overboard with detail, generally in drafting it’s best to keep going back and sharpening as much as possible. You leaned not just against a tree but against a weeping silver birch; the voice at the other end of the phone sounded like the Tin Man’s in The Wizard of Oz. When you write scene, your job is to mimic the event, create an experiential representation of it for the reader.

Look at the examples given earlier, and think about how much the details add to those scenes: the hushed silence of the hospital room and three hard tumors on the left lobe of the liver in Selzer’s essay. In Beard’s, we see the bickering but ultimate acceptance of this close group of coworkers. We sense the author’s ambivalent position in the group—shut out of their “talking physics,” as she tells us earlier—but also her authority within the group. We sense, in the hyperbolic description of Bob’s pipe smoke (“like daggers”), a bit of foreshadowing of a coming tragic event.

In The Elements of Style, William Strunk, Jr., explains that the one point of accord among good writers is the need for detail that is “specific, definite, and concrete.” (We also address this point in Chapter 1.) Concrete detail appeals to the senses; other writers call such details “proofs.” If Selzer told readers that sometimes in surgery he found cancer, we might abstractly believe him, but it’s hard to associate that fact with real life and death. In this passage, we’re convinced by the specifics: three hard tumors on the liver, the surgeon’s voice mumbling, “Bad, bad.”

Abstract language—the opposite of relying on concrete detail—refers to the larger concepts we use that exist on a purely mental level, with no appeal to the senses: liberty, justice, contentment, and so on. These terms may contain the implication of sensory detail (you may flash on “warmth” when you hear “contentment,” but that’s a personal reaction that wouldn’t make sense to, say, a penguin), but they are in themselves broad categories only. Beard could have summarized her relationships with her coworkers; Selzer could have presented a few expository sentences about soul and body, surgeon as God. We want experiences, not lectures. We want to enter into events and uncover their meanings for ourselves.

Paying attention to concrete detail and the input of our own senses also helps save us from the literary pitfall of cliché, an expression or concept that’s been overused. Frequently, clichés are dead metaphors, and we don’t pay attention anymore to the comparisons they contain. If Beard had described Bob’s pipe tobacco as smelling like “dirty socks,” or “killing” her nose, she would have been indulging in cliché. Instead, she used the information of her senses to create a fresh image.

Next time you work on a piece of creative nonfiction, hear yourself talking through the story to friends in a crowded coffee shop or club. There’s plenty to divert their attention: music, people-watching, smoke, and noise. Which details do you use to hold their attention? Do you imitate the look of someone’s face, the sound of a voice? Do you screech to demonstrate the sound of car tires on asphalt? Your reading audience will be equally distractible. Think about how to render these attention-grabbing devices in your prose. You may want to consult Chapter 1, “The Body of Memory,” to remind yourself how to use sensory detail.

Developing Character

Character development, like learning to write effective dialogue, is part of writing scene. It’s another particularly easy-to-miss demand of good creative nonfiction. After all, we know what our parents, children, or lovers look like. Unconsciously, we tend to assume that everyone else does as well.

Suzanne has, by marriage, a very funny grandmother. She wasn’t intentionally funny, but nonetheless the mere mention of her name tends to bring down the room when the family’s together. The family bears in mind, as courteous people, that we need to break through our uncontrollable giggling and clue other listeners in to the source of our amusement: “Well, she came from a tiny town in south Georgia and talked about nothing all day long but her ar-ther-itis and her gallbladder that was leakin’ plus she lied compulsively and pursed her mouth in this funny way when she did. . . .” After a few minutes of this our listeners understand why we find her so endlessly amusing. This kind of filling in, also natural in conversation, is the essence of character development.

Nothing demonstrates the power of fine characterization like studying writers who, in a few strokes, can help us apprehend someone sensually (through sight, sound, or feel) as well as give us a sense of their essence. The following are examples of quick, effective character development from essays we love:

•   Albert Goldbarth in “After Yitzl”: “My best friend there shoed horses. He had ribs like barrel staves, his sweat was miniature glass pears.”

•   Lawrence Sutin in “Man and Boy”: “In the case of my father and myself, I had the fullness of his face and his desire to write, which had been abandoned when he came to America with a family to raise. . . . He was a middle-aged man who was sobbing and sweaty and his body was heavy and so soft I imagined his ribs giving way like a snowman’s on the first warm winter day.”

•   Judith Kitchen in “Things of This Life”: “Mayme would step onto the platform wearing a dark purple coat, her black braids wound tightly around her head. Her skin was too soft and wrinkly. When you kissed her cheek, it wobbled, and you wished you didn’t have to do that.”

Details that show the essence of individuals—in both their typical (commonness with their type; grandmothers typically have soft and wrinkly skin) and specific glory (“sweat like miniature pears”)—are blazingly effective when you come upon them. Think, when you write about someone close to you, how you would characterize that person in a stroke or two for someone else.

Dialogue

It can be difficult to allow ourselves to use direct dialogue in creative nonfiction. After all, memory’s faulty; we can’t recall conversations word for word, so why try? The answer is that we need to try, because insofar as nonfiction attempts to be an honest record of the observant mind, dialogue matters. We recall voices, not summaries; we observe scenes in our head, not expository paragraphs.

Dialogue generally moves action forward. Selzer quotes himself finding the metastasized cancer, and Beard gives a sense of the dynamics of her office. Dialogue must characterize and capture the voice of the speaker, however, not simply give information. The latter is called in fiction writing “information dumping,” and it occurs when you have people say things like, “Well, Carmen, I remember you told me you were taking the cross-town bus that day only because your white 1999 Volvo had developed a gasket problem.” Information dumping is less of a problem in nonfiction because this genre is reality based (and people really do not talk that way). But, if you cue your readers that you are recreating a conversation, it may be tempting to lard the dialogue with information you can’t figure out how to get in any other way. Don’t do it.

Everyone has a natural cadence and a dialect to his or her speech. We nearly always speak in simple sentences, not complex-compound ones. We might say, “When the rain comes, the grass grows,” which has one short dependent clause beginning with the word when; we aren’t likely to say, “Whenever it happens the rain comes, provided the proper fertilizer’s been applied, the grass grows”—a simple sentence or main clause (“the grass grows”) festooned with wordy subordinate clauses. We frequently speak in sentence fragments or ungrammatical snippets—for example, the how-are-you question “Getting along?” instead of the grammatically correct “Are you getting along?”

One exception to these rules of natural speech might be a person who is pompous and wordy. Perhaps you’re writing dialogue to capture the voice of a stuffy English professor you know. In that case, go to town. Just bear in mind that what bores you will bore others fairly quickly. In the case of people who are boorish, dull, or otherwise hard to listen to, give readers a sample of the voice and they will fill in the rest. A little goes a long way.

One final caveat: beware of elaborate taglines, which identify the speaker, such as “he said,” “she argued,” and so forth. In dialogue between two people taglines are often dispensable after the first two. Even when you must use them, stick as much as possible to “said” and “asked,” two fairly invisible words in the context of dialogue. It’s an easy mistake to make—and a difficult one to overlook as a reader—to have all of your characters “retort,” “storm,” or “muse.” And make sure the words themselves contain tone as much as possible. (Tone can also be conveyed in a character’s gesture, as in Beard’s colleagues casually breaking the rules by smoking in their office.) Don’t follow each speech tag with an adverb such as “angrily,” “sadly,” and so on. If you feel the need to use those words, ask yourself why the dialogue itself doesn’t seem to contain those feelings.

Point of View

Every story is told by a storyteller (even in a piece with multiple speakers, one speaker dominates at a time), and every storyteller must be situated somehow within the frame of the work. This situating is called point of view (POV), and we express it through choice of pronouns: I (first person); you (second person); he, she, they (third person). Though it may seem at first blush as though all nonfiction must be told in first person, skillful writers do use the techniques of second- and third-person POV to wonderful effect in nonfiction. Some writers also use the first-person plural (we) POV, to create “communal” or “community” memoir.

Here’s a sentence from “The Fourth State of Matter” again, a classic first-person approach: “It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life.” Compare that with a short passage from Richard Selzer, who uses second person liberally throughout his essay. Watch the careful way he slips from first- to second-person POV, as if inviting the reader to experience the fearfulness of a surgeon’s power:

I must confess that the priestliness of my profession has ever been impressed on me. In the beginning there are vows. . . . And if the surgeon is like a poet, then the scars you have made on countless bodies are like verses into the fashioning of which you have poured your soul.

In contrast, Judith Kitchen’s essay “Things of This Life” uses third person throughout the piece to create a sense of freshness and excitement in a childhood memoir:

Consider the child idly browsing in the curio shop. She’s been on vacation in the Adirondacks, and her family has (over the past week) canoed the width of the lake and up a small, meandering river. . . . So why, as she sifts through boxes of fake arrowheads made into key chains, passes down the long rows of rubber tomahawks, dyed rabbits’ feet, salt shakers with the words “Indian Lake” painted in gold, beaded moccasins made of what could only in the imagination be called leather, is she happier than any time during the past week?

Kitchen, further along in the essay, tells us, “Now consider the woman who was that child.” It seems at first an odd choice, to write about the self as if it were someone completely apart, a stranger. But as Kitchen unfolds her sense of her life as “alien,” a space she’s inhabiting that raises questions she still can’t answer (“How can she go on, wanting like this, for the rest of her life?”), the strategy becomes a coherent part of the architecture of the essay.

Imagine the paragraphs it would take to explain such an alienation from the self—a sense of distance from one’s own desires—and the relative powerlessness such an explanation would have. Annie Dillard writes in our introductory quote that she “delighted” to learn that nonfiction, like poetry, can carry meaning in its structures. Kitchen here has wisely chosen a structure to convey her feeling—a feeling open only to the clumsiest articulation.

In “People Are Starving” (see also Chapter 5, “The Body of Identity,”), Suzanne Rivecca chooses to make her personal story of eating disorders a communal one by using the we pronoun throughout. Sometimes the “we” narrator conveys what all the members of this “we” would have in common, but sometimes the “we” also shows a multiplicity of experiences, such as in the following list-like passage:

We had milk money. We had lunch money. We had a Bee Gees lunchbox. We had a plaid Thermos full of soup that smelled like sweat. We had a brown paper sack. Our mom put notes in our lunch: on stationery with kittens on it; on folded-up loose-leaf; on pastel Post-its; on scraps from yellow legal pads. The notes said, Have a great day. They said, I love you. They said, God loves you. They said, Be good today. They meant, Remember who you are. They meant, Come back safe. They packed us notes every day and we wished they wouldn’t. They never packed us notes and we wished they would. Our moms packed us damp baby carrots. One pale piece of string cheese. A sandwich composed of geometric slabs of meat and cheese—perfect circles, perfect squares. A rectangular brownie, a perennially uneaten orange, a zip-lock bag of humid saltines, a Fruit Roll-Up, a slippery hard-boiled egg, browning slices of apple, a bent granola bar. A handful of cornflakes in a plastic bag, a wedge of lasagna wrapped in foil, a bunch of lettuce in Tupperware. A single pancake in the shape of our first initial. A wilted five-dollar bill. Five one-dollar bills, so crisp they looked fake. A handful of candy corn. Nothing at all.

This list—so vivid in its concrete details!—immerses the reader in the world of school lunch and may even trigger memories of our own school lunches. The experiences are all so different and sometimes contradict each other, yet within these differences a commonality emerges: the messages we’re given around food, and how food defines our home, class, and cultural environments.

Image and Metaphor

Janet Burroway, in her text Writing Fiction, describes metaphor as the foundation stone “from which literature derives.” Image (any literary element that creates a sense impression in the mind) and metaphor (the use of comparison) form the heart of any literary work. Notice how, trying to impress this importance upon you, we strain to make strong metaphor: metaphors are the foundation stones of a building; they’re the pumping hearts of literary writing.

For example, in “First” (see Anthology), Ryan Van Meter allows many of his concrete details to have metaphoric overtones. In the first paragraph, he describes in detail where he and his friend Ben are situated in the station wagon—separate from and turned away from the parents—and then characterizes it as feeling “like a secret, as though they are not even in the car with us.” This image of facing in different directions recurs throughout the essay and emphasizes the essential themes of the piece: this memory highlights a sense of secrecy, as well as a rupturing in perspective between children and parents.

While essays can be organized many ways—through topic, chronology, or passage of time—organization through image and metaphor has become much more common. Clustering thoughts through images and loose associations (and metaphors are, at the most basic level, associations) seems fundamental to the way the human mind works.

You can often find clues to your own imagistic or metaphoric organizations when you recall the sensory association a thought or experience calls to mind. If the summer your best friend was killed in a diving accident always comes back to you with a whiff of honeysuckle, stay with that image and explore it in writing for a while. Does it lead to concepts of sweetness, youth, temptation, the quick blooming? If you let yourself write about the image alone for a while—not rushing to get to the subject your mind may insist is “the real story”—a more complex series of themes in your story will probably emerge.

A Note on Cliché

Most clichés, as we mention previously, are concepts or images that are emptied of meaning. Often, they are metaphors or similes that have lost their imagistic connections. When we hear the phrase “good as gold,” we don’t picture a transaction backed by the value of gold, rather than by payment that is devalued or counterfeit—the origins of the term. We probably don’t think of “gold” in a tangible way at all.

Our student, writer Lindsay Petrie, came up with a method of breathing new life into a cliché, for those times when such a phrase seems somehow appropriate, or those times when you want the little surprise of making your reader really experience those words again. She called this move the clicheze, as it is like spraying a freshener like Febreze on your cliché, refreshing it and bringing it to life. A clichézed “good as gold” might be ironic, like “as good as gold if the gold were a ring and you can’t get it off your finger.” Or serious: “as good as gold if you’re a prospector and you haven’t eaten in three days.” You can see how the clicheze treatment makes the words and the image come to life again.

The Rhythm of Your Sentences

It’s a well-known fact that sentences must contain some variation. You must have become acquainted with this fact already. It’s clear if you read a certain kind of prose. A work must use different kinds of sentence structures. Different kinds of sentence structures help alleviate that numbing feeling. It’s a feeling you don’t want your readers to have.

The previous paragraph contains six sentences, each composed of about ten words, and each is a simple sentence, beginning with a subject and its verb. Unlike this sentence you’re currently reading, none begins with a clause. None is short. None, unlike the twenty-five-word sentence introducing this second paragraph, engages us for very long. Read both of these paragraphs together. Do you sense a difference? Do you, as we do, begin to go blank by the middle of the first paragraph and finally feel some relief at the second one?

Notice that the second paragraph in this section of the book, while clarifying many of the ideas that the first paragraph contains, varies sentence structure and length. It also varies voice. One sentence uses the command voice (“Read both paragraphs together”), two are cast in the interrogative voice—they ask questions. Clauses like “Unlike this sentence” and “as we do” appear at the beginnings, middles, and ends of sentences to break up that repetitive simple structure.

The Poetry of Prose

Virginia Woolf, who many writers would list as a “favorite poet,” began work not with an idea but with a “rhythm,” writing to a friend, “Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you have that, you can’t use the wrong words.” Though it’s become popular, and helpful at times, to divide up nonfiction into lyric essays and non-lyric essays, doing so can obscure the fact that all language is controlled by rhythm—especially a highly stressed, partly Germanic language like our own. If you learn to see how language operates through rhythm and sound, as well as how sentence structure affects meaning, you will be delighted at the new power of your prose.

Let’s examine a paragraph of Woolf’s prose, one that appears at the start of her novel Mrs. Dalloway:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it?

Woolf begins with two short, emphatic sentences that illustrate the joyous, “plunging” movements of her heroine, Clarissa Dalloway, going out on a trip to purchase flowers. She follows that with two long sentences, the first ending with the prepositional phrase “into the open air,” the sentence structure itself mirroring the protagonist’s entry into the larger world beyond her doors. Those emphatic semicolons that first set off the arrival of waves in her mind cue us that the “kiss of a wave” may not be an entirely pleasant thing, and prepare us for the “foreboding.” The final use of dashes to set off the question “was that it?” enables that phrase to “float” syntactically, not clearly connected to anything else in the sentence—is she wondering what Peter Walsh said, what she was thinking then, or something else? Author Virginia Tufte uses the term syntactic symbolism to describe syntax that creates emotional effects.

Here is an excerpt from writer Dorothy Parker, a description of a breakup:

But I knew. I knew. I knew because he had been far away from me long before he went. He’s gone away and he won’t come back. He’s gone away and he won’t come back, he’s gone away and he’ll never come back.

Here the repetition of “knew” captures the author’s sense that she cannot drive this devastating knowledge out of her mind. Even the tense shifting—past “knew” to present “He’s gone”—reflects her inability to cease feeling the painful emotion.

The choices you make as a writer either charge your prose with energy and support your narrative, or represent a missed opportunity. Sometimes, as with the unvaried sentence lengths we mentioned, your choices work against you. Sentence length and sentence structure, syntax, paragraphing, clause placement, and similar elements deeply influence the meaning of your prose.

In Brian Doyle’s “Leap” (see Anthology), variations in sentence length and patterns of repetition underscore the terrible story of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center. Doyle stresses the detail of victims choosing to jump from the towers rather than die in the building, and of reaching for one another’s hands as they did so. Here is the essay’s opening:

A couple leaped from the south tower, hand in hand. They reached for each other and their hands met and they jumped.

Jennifer Brickhouse saw them falling, hand in hand.

Many people jumped. Perhaps hundreds. Who knows.

Doyle begins this essay with a terse, abbreviated style. He uses short, factual sentences, and naming the witnesses of this event—Jennifer Brickhouse, in this excerpt—increases the reportorial nature of the prose. The one poetic element of this opening is the repetition of “hand in hand” at the end of two sentences that follow each other in quick succession (this type of repetition is known in rhetoric as an epistrophe). The words hand and hold repeat frequently in this essay, reinforcing Doyle’s focus on this small act of connection within the midst of such tragedy.

As “Leap” progresses, Doyle breaks the pattern with several sentences that are much longer. These break out of that tone of terse recital:

I try to whisper prayers for the sudden dead and the harrowed families of the dead and the screaming sounds of the murderers but I keep coming back to his hand and her hand nestled in each other with such extraordinary ordinary succinct ancient naked stunning perfect simple ferocious love.

This sentence is not only long, it is also underpunctuated: Doyle leaves out the commas we expect to find between clauses and between adjectives. The pause-less, rushing feel of this sentence performs the chaos of the event as well as the writer’s breathless horror and awe. The voice of the essay, contemplating what happened that day, becomes overwhelmed. A pileup of nine adjectives in a row would generally feel overdone, but the contrast it creates with the held-back quality of Doyle’s earlier writing makes this move feel justified and powerful. And the adjectives are so surprising, and in some cases contradictory, or almost contradictory—“extraordinary ordinary,” “simple ferocious”—that we move with Doyle through the impossibility of fully capturing the victims’ response.

Nonfiction Structures and Containers

As we described in Chapter 8, “The Tradition of the Personal Essay,” essays often have two lines of movement: the horizontal (plot, story, linear development) and the vertical (insight, reflection, delving below the surface). You can envision your work in these terms. Is it more horizontal or vertical? Does the balance between the two feel adequate, or is it unbalanced in some way? Is there a beginning, middle, and end?

Even in experimental or lyric work—works that aren’t dependent on plot—we need to figure out what is creating forward movement in the piece. John Gardner, a fiction writer, has translated the archaic term profluence (which literally means “onward”) onto literary craft, using the term to describe the way a story lets us know that it is getting somewhere. In creative nonfiction, we can think about profluence too: Are we “getting somewhere”? What kind of container or structure will help this movement along?

Sometimes, the story itself will lend itself to profluence: for example, a travel narrative often has natural starting and ending points. Other times, we need to find a small thread that will act as this propellant, perhaps even something quite mundane. For example, in his essay “Burl’s,” Bernard Cooper “bookends” his essay with a simple task: at the beginning of the essay, Cooper’s father sends the boy outside a diner to get a newspaper from the vending machine. While doing this task, the child narrator notices two flashily dressed women teetering on high heels down the sidewalk, and as they draw closer he sees they also carry the gender markers of men: stubbles of beard, Adam’s apples, broad shoulders. When one of the women trips and her wig shifts, the narrator sees “a rift in her composure, a window through which I could glimpse the shades of maleness that her dress and wig and make-up obscured.” This observation leads him into a rumination on how things are not always as they seem:

Any woman might be a man; the fact of it clanged through the chambers of my brain. In broad day, in the midst of traffic, with my parents drinking coffee a few feet away, I felt as if everything I understood, everything I had taken for granted up to that moment . . . had been squeezed out of me.

He breaks from this scene to the heart of the essay, where Cooper meditates for several pages on the concrete memories that gave him his first inklings of his own blurred sexual boundaries. We then return to the newspaper at the end of the essay: “I handed my father the Herald. He opened the paper and disappeared behind it. My mother stirred her coffee and sighed.”

Though we had almost forgotten about the small task at this point, it returns to provide a satisfying, small “plot” for the piece. He has suspended a small moment in time, and in the few moments while he performed this task, the narrator has gained new insights into his experience.

In your own essay, think about the structure of your piece and whether there might be some small “plot,” a container that will hold your deeper musings in place. Read several essays in our Anthology with this idea in mind: How do these writers begin and end their essays? What creates profluence? How do we move across space and time?

The Looping Essay

If you map nonfiction structures, you’ll find many shapes: the woven pattern of the braided essay, the rising and falling pattern of conflict-crisis-resolution, and so on. One classic structure that particularly lends itself to the movements of creative nonfiction is the looping essay. Creative nonfiction often involves holding a subject, idea, or image, up to the light: establishing it on the page, examining its shifting facets, studying its evolution. In the looping essay, you loop back again as you close to the place you started. You do not repeat what you’ve already done—that moment where you began comes back, yes, but with a new insight.

In Brent Staples’s “The Coroner’s Photographs” (see Anthology), the essay opens in the midst of a searing scene: the author views images of the body of his murdered brother, seen lying in a morgue. The essay winds back to recall the brother’s childhood, and his life as a drug dealer. Staples takes us through his deep emotional connection with his brother’s body. “I know his contours well,” he writes. “I bathed and diapered him when he was a baby and studied his features as he grew.” The coroner’s report on this death serves as a stark and clinical contrast to the author’s memories—the weight of Blake Staples’s heart and lungs, the minutiae of his gunshot wounds. The end brings us back to the scene where we began, but only after we’ve lived Staples’s difficult journey to choose to see the coroner’s files.

Virginia Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” is a classic “looping” essay. This meditative essay begins with a mundane purpose:

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.

With these lines, Woolf creates a reason for the essay that follows: a physical reason that sets us (both writer and reader) moving. She then embarks on the walk with a purpose, and what follows is an extended meditation on the permeable nature of the self, triggered by the sights and people she encounters on this walk. After being distracted again and again on our way across London—privy to the intimate lives taking place behind lit windows—we finally return triumphant with pencil in hand:

Here again is the usual door; here the chair turned as we left it and the china bowl and the brown ring on the carpet. And here—let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence—is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.

If, as Joan Didion says, we write “to learn what [we] are thinking,” it makes sense that the thought that compels an essay may be the one to which it wants to return, refreshed and refracted. This is particularly true of the meditative essay, but the structure is common even in more narrative pieces. Sometimes, when you cannot find your ending, you will discover that the germ of it is already planted, ready for your loop back.

Humor

Of all the audience responses writers may want to elicit, none is harder to gauge than humor. It’s hard to argue about the sentimental value of people falling in love or the tragedy of war, but we all tend to have a comedy vocabulary peculiarly our own. Emily Dickinson, who lends our book its title, had a peculiar habit of roaring with laughter over the obituaries every day. The juxtaposition of odd or unexpected things makes up a lot of what we find comic. So do word choice, sentence structure, and the stance authors take toward the world and toward themselves.

In his essay “The Drama Bug,” well-known humorist David Sedaris falls in love with theater and affects a Shakespearean speech that becomes hilarious in juxtaposition with the ordinary events occupying his teenage years. Over a chicken dinner with family, he proclaims, “Methinks, kind sir, most gentle lady, fellow siblings all, that this barnyard fowl be most tasty and succulent.” Humor writers like Sedaris are constantly mining their lives for incongruities to use in their work.

Exaggeration, or hyperbole, is also a classic technique of humor. Sedaris clearly exaggerates in the long-winded pseudo-Elizabethan speeches he delivers in “Drama Bug”; no one could remember their own monologues that precisely. (And surely his family would have swatted him with the barnyard fowl before listening to all of that!) Writer Anne Lamott is another comic exaggerator. It’s a device she uses again and again to great effect, as when she describes a reading in which “I had jet lag, the self-esteem of a prawn, and to top it off, I had stopped breathing. I sounded just like the English patient.”

One characteristic that Sedaris and Lamott have in common is the self-puncturing qualities of the authors. They laugh at themselves so freely we feel encouraged to laugh with them—and, if we’re honest with ourselves, we all have a gold mine of material in self-deprecation.

TRY IT

1.   Go through a piece of your writing and find a passage of summary that could or should be in scene. Don’t fret right now about whether scene is absolutely necessary here: the point is to develop the skill of automatically asking yourself whether that option will help you.

Sometimes we stymie ourselves by imagining we must remember everything or we can’t describe anything. So work with what you do remember. You may forget the look of a room but remember the sound or smell of it (think of Selzer’s defining silence in that hospital room). Or create a bridge, such as writing a few sentences about how this is what a dialogue sounds like in your memory as you try to recreate it, giving yourself permission to fill in what you don’t remember word for word. Remember that almost any device for reconstruction is fine, as long as you let readers in on what you’re doing.

2.   To get a feel for writing scene, recreate an event that took place in the last week—one with characters you can delineate and dialogue you can remember. It doesn’t have to be important—it probably will help if it isn’t. The point is simply to write two to three pages in which a location is established through description, people are characterized and talk, and something happens.

3.   Finally, when you feel confident of your basic skills, remember a scene out of your own life that does contain the utmost importance. Write the scene with as much fidelity as possible. Don’t question right now why what matters matters. Trust your intuition, and tap into all of the passion you have invested in this scene.

Now question yourself. Why was a certain gesture or inflection so important? The chances are that your emotional story is locked into the details you remember of your life. When you begin to question the scene in this way, scrutinizing every detail, you’ll probably discover an essay waiting to be written about this crucial moment.

4.   Think of someone close to you and try to convey their essence, through clothing, sound, dialogue, gestures, and so forth, in two or three paragraphs. Don’t aim to write scene; this portrait doesn’t need to contain action, merely characterization.

When you’re reasonably finished, trade your piece with a writing partner. Read each other’s sketches and then elaborate on the person described, giving an overall, abstract sense of that individual’s personality. How close did you come? Discuss with your partner ways this sketch could be refined: important details that may have been omitted, or others that could be misleading. Is this character sketch on its way to becoming an essay? Articulate to yourself why this character matters, why she is different, or why he is intriguingly typical.

5.   Write a page or two of dialogue. Practice for this by using your notebook to record snippets of speech verbatim: exchanges with classmates, friends, spouses, parents. Pay attention to the syntax of speech. How much is grammatically correct or incorrect? How much slang or dialect appears in different speakers’ voices? When you feel ready, write a page or two of typical dialogue—you can record it and write it down, or try to recreate it—with someone fairly close to you. Do the same partner swap with this dialogue you did with characterization, and see how much of the person you’re describing comes through in his or her voice.

6.   The only way to fully understand point of view is to experiment with it. Pull out an earlier essay of yours, or write a simple paragraph about some subject you’ve thought about as a likely one. Then recast the point of view, from first to second or third or first-person plural. Force yourself to keep going through at least one paragraph.

7.   Try writing a piece entirely from the first-person plural (we) point of view. See how this move might help you make connections between your personal experience and a communal one.

8.   Do a quick diagnostic of two to three paragraphs of your own prose (less might not be representative enough). How long do your sentences tend to be? How do you structure them? Do you vary voices or speech acts, such as questioning, stating, and commanding, or do you simply use the declarative or simple statement voice? Challenge yourself to approach a piece of prose in a way you haven’t in the past—more short sentences or sentence fragments, perhaps, or more shifts in voice. See how this change alters your work and opens up the possibilities of the essay.

9.   Considering Brian Doyle’s powerful changes in sentence length, take a page of your own prose that doesn’t feel quite right to you yet, and deliberately vary your sentence length. Go from short and terse to long and rich, snappy to overwhelmed and overwhelming. Vary your punctuation, both over- and under-using it. You will certainly not want to keep all of the changes you make in this exercise, but underline or circle those sentences that do seem to work, articulating to yourself why and how they do.

10.   Try to identify a simple “container scene” in your piece that you could use to hold the essay in place. Begin the piece with this scene, and return to it periodically, or just at the end of the essay. Use this scene as anchoring thread and see if the essay feels more shaped or polished.

11.   Create a visual diagram that describes the “profluence” of your essay. Does it move in a straight line? Does it spiral? Does it look like a spiderweb? or a series of peaks and valleys? There are any number of ways to envision the forward movement of your essay. See if this kind of representation might open up some new ideas about the structure of the piece that might enhance its effect.

12.   When you are struggling to find an ending to an essay, consider the looping structure. Go back and reread only your first paragraph. List for yourself what is there: the characters, events, images, suggestions, ideas. Imagine the metaphoric possibilities of each, the capacity of the images you are already using to recur and be extended. Write a closing paragraph after carefully considering only the first—or first and second—paragraph. If the looping structure feels right, continue to revise and refine it.

13.   Practice writing deliberate incongruities, twists, exaggerations, and understatements. What is the strangest sight you’ve seen over the last year? Was it a man in a tuxedo kicking his shoes off and jumping into the surf? A Santa Claus withdrawing money from an ATM? What experience in your own life led to the most unexpected sight?

14.   What irritates you? Write a few paragraphs on the most constant irritants in your life, whether it’s telemarketers, the fact that you have almost the same phone number as the local pizzeria, whatever. Write dialogue and scene; strive to be funny. At the same time, think, as previously, of larger subjects this irritant suggests.

15.   Study any essay in the Anthology (or in your outside reading) and see if there is one technique you can “borrow” to strengthen your own piece. Notice variety in the sentence structures, the way the author uses image and metaphor. Study the larger structure: how does the essay move from beginning to end? Study the transitions from one paragraph or section to another. Observe closely, like an apprentice, and see how you can practice incorporating the writer’s techniques into your own work.

FOR FURTHER READING

In Our Anthology

Note: All the sample essays in our anthology, of course, showcase elements of strong writing. Cited in this chapter:

•   “Leap” by Brian Doyle

•   “The Coroner’s Photographs” by Brent Staples

•   “First” by Ryan Van Meter

Resources Available Online

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

•   “People Are Starving” by Suzanne Rivecca

•   “The Knife” by Richard Selzer

•   “Street Haunting” by Virginia Woolf

Print Resources

•   Truth Serum: A Memoir by Bernard Cooper

•   “After Yitzl” by Albert Goldbarth in A Sympathy of Souls

•   “Things of This Life” by Judith Kitchen in Only the Dance: Essays on Time and Memory

•   The Elements of Style by William Strunk, Jr., and E. B. White

•   A Postcard Memoir by Lawrence Sutin