What I’ve Been Reading About Writing
When I signed up for the 52-Week Writing Challenge at the end of December, I committed to writing book reviews. I also hoped to explore some other areas of personal writing as well, but the book reviews are what I can do most easily, so that’s what I chose.
For most of June and July I have been reading about writing personal essays though not writing any. I got about six weeks behind in the challenge during April and May, and I’ve spent most of the time since then trying frantically to catch up. With the publication of this piece, I will be officially all caught up. Here, then, are examples of what I’ve been reading about writing. I hope to have some of my own examples of these essays, particularly the braided essay, to publish in future weeks.
Lorraine Berry begins this essay on essays with the reminder that Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) is generally credited as the inventor of the essay. The word he used to describe this type of writing is essai, which comes from a French verb that means to try or to attempt. Thus essays are attempts at creating or finding meaning. Berry also includes links to pieces involved in a recent discussion of whether the personal essay has run its course before she gets to the heart of her presentation:
literary essays have some recognizable structures, which describe their framework but not necessarily their content. I would argue that just about anything can become content for an essay, and because of that, writers have unlimited writing opportunities still available.
She describes several structures for what she calls lyric essays:
- The linear narrative essay, which usually tells a story chronologically
- The triptych essay, which contains three sections that aren’t directly linked but that each illuminate the other two
- The collage essay, which comprises bits and pieces that often resemble poetry
- The experimental essay, which abandons all traditional essay forms
- The hermit crab essay, which applies one structure to something else (the example is a game of Monopoly applied to walking the streets of Atlantic City)
- The braided essay, which weaves together several different stories
Berry includes links to many examples of the various essay types.
On the blog for Brevity, the guide to creative nonfiction, Allison K Williams covers much of the same ground as Berry does in the article above, except that Williams writes her descriptions of the various essay types as illustrations of each type.
3. Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide
If you’re a visual learner, Tim Bascom’s got you covered. He offers advice on how essayists can explore various forms to discover the form best suited to the content of an essay:
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, which, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures may help an essay writer invent a more personal, more unique form. Here, then, are several main options.
He uses diagrams as well as words to describe these options:
- Narrative with a lift
- The whorl of reflection
- The formal limits of focus
- Dipping into the well
- Braided and layered structures
- Coming full circle
I found this approach intriguing because it addresses that basic issue of essay writing: You have to know the traditional forms or structures before you can adapt them for your particular purpose — something like the old admonition “You have to know the rules before you’re allowed to break them.”
There’s a lot of experiential and exploratory potential here. This article, which I found after I had found the first two, turned out to be the perfect follow-up to those. The two articles above are a good overview of traditional forms for personal essays and encourage writers to learn how to use those forms. Bascom’s article then encourages writers how to explore their material through those forms while at the same time seeing how to adapt form to fit function and content.
Waverly Fitzgerald is a writer and writing teacher:
As a teacher, I focus on classes about craft and one of my favorite classes to teach is a class called Shapes of Stories. I introduce the writers in the class to five basic structures — the classic story arc, collage, braid, frame and circle — and ask them to try writing an essay or short fiction or poem using each shape.
In this article she focuses on the braiding structure. She goes into depth on how to determine whether your material is appropriate for braiding, with special emphasis on the differences between a braid and a collage structure, both of which juxtapose different kinds of elements:
When should a writer use a braid?
I think it’s a great form to use when you have two opposing views to compare and contrast, two themes you suspect are related or when you have two characters with equally compelling stories. Braids also are a natural way to create suspense.
Any time you are dealing with a complicated story with many elements, thinking of it as a braid may help you sort it out.
Fitzgerald bolsters her discussion with lots of examples of braided structure from both fiction and nonfiction: “I most often see the braided form in books, rather than short pieces, because it’s harder to recognize the shape (which relies on repetition) in a short piece.” Finally, she includes a list of books, mostly fiction, that participants in one of her writing workshops suggested might be examples of braided structure.
She also offers this advice, which could pertain to any traditional essay form: “Structures should resonate with the content of a story. So don’t try fitting a story into this format unless it seems right.”
