He had learned this principle from screenwriters in Hollywood and insisted, “Think what you want, those guys know how plots work.” “Readers do not want to put their foot on the same step twice” is the way veteran essayist Bill Kittredge put it while swapping ideas at a writing conference. If she flatlines on an emotional plateau, not raising the tension, then we are likely to lose interest and walk away. We keep on reading unless the writer stops stair-stepping upward toward the critical moment when change becomes necessary. Narrative essays keep us engaged because we want answers to such questions. When the setting is Beard’s house, we wonder, “Will she find a way to let go of the dying dog, not to mention her failing marriage?” And when she’s at work, we find ourselves asking, “What about the guy with the gun? How will he impact her one ‘safe place’?” In fact, within Beard’s narrative, two sets of questions, correlating to parallel subplots, create a kind of double tension.
The sequence of scenes matches roughly the unfolding of real events, but there is suspense to pull us along, represented by questions we want answered. Take, for example, Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” The narrator, abandoned by her husband, is caring for a dying dog and going to work at a university office to which an angry graduate student has brought a gun. Will we reach the top? And what will we see from there? Such tension forces the reader into a climb, muscles contracting. More crucial, though, is their use of tension, which changes the flat line of chronology into a rising line-a plot. Savvy essayists, as a result, twist their chronology, beginning at the end or breaking to a moment in the past, even weaving together several timelines.
If unrelieved, it becomes the ticking clock in the jail or, worse, the flat line of death. The march of time can be methodical-first this, then this, then this. We instinctively turn to chronology as a way to recreate the past, putting our lives into a neat moment-by-moment order. Narrative is the natural starting place since narrative is a natural structure for telling others about personal events. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures may help an essay writer invent a more personal, more unique form.
They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms, which, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. 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. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. Nothing is wasted though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. Sometimes I even seem to go backward, losing all direction. Although I may start an essay with a notion of where I am headed, inevitably I veer away as I get new ideas or encounter dead ends. “This is what it looks like”:Īha, I thought, as we discussed parallels in the writing process. Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual GuideĪ design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation.