Lesson No. 3: Narrative Arc in Personal Essays

many arcs

 

Readings

“How to Create a Narrative Arc for Personal Essays” by Jody Bates

“Fuck You, Columbus” by Sloane Crosley

“Inheritance” by Angela Pelster

“Not Less than 1,000 Bottles for Horesradish” by Jen Hirt 

 

Discussion

Beginning. Middle. End.

Introduction. Body. Conclusion.

Act I. Act II. Act III

Past. Present. Future. 

These are the narrative arcs to which we are accustomed. It’s that line that charts the plot and action, that’s swollen and pregnant with meaning about to come. The slow rise of setting up a story, hitting that climax, and then the denouement.

In other words:

 

narrative arc

 

 

Many essays and stories, however, are more complicated than this. There are so many stories and arcs going on, so many stages of development and meaning that a simple beginning-middle-end cannot apply to these written works. 

In other words:

 

narrative arc complicated

 

You may be thinking that the above diagram is confusing instead of helpful. You are right. Sort of. It is confusing because narrative arc can be complex. Not every person in an essay rises to its climax at the same time. Thus, there are no word orgies. But there is a relationship there. 

The narrator starts to develop more as the story builds in events and meaning. The more problematic situations she is placed in, the more we can understand her own complexity. 

Let me state right now that I haven’t given any inclination that the narrative arc has to be a chronologicaly-told one. As Jody Bates explains in her craft essay, not every story has to start at the beginning and end at the end.

In other words:

 

shakes arc

 

Or, if you’re a definition-defying narrative arc genius, then perhaps this:

 

weird arc

 

Whatever your narrative arc is, it eventually has to lead to something that answers the question the essay is posing, or at least acknowledge that it’s there. You can start where ever you want to start in an essay, and you can end whenever you want to end. And in between all of that is some connective tissue that clasps onto every facet of the arc, that makes an essay incredibly strong.

 

Questions

  1. What is the general beginning, middle, and end of each of the essays you read this week?
  2. Thinking about chronology and time, in what ways do you think Hirt’s organization of her essay strengthen the narrative? In what ways did it weaken the narrative?
  3. Pelster uses both past and present tense in “Inheritance.” If she had written the whole essay in just present tense, would the essay have a different move? What if it was all in past tense? Would that change the tone?
  4. What do the time stamps bring to the story in Crosley’s essay? Do they strengthen her story or weaken it at all?

 

Writing Exercises

  1. Think of one of the weirdest or most complicated day you have ever experienced. Write out the events of the day in the same way that Crosley does. Make up times if you can’t remember them.
  2. Think of a moment in your life when you felt complete love and joy for the world. In one brief paragraph, describe an aspect or part of this moment in past tense. Then, write it in present tense. Then, you guessed it, write the same story in future tense.
  3. Write about your grandparents or anyone you have known for years and describe the arc and details of your relationship through physical features of you and this person. Have you seen wrinkles grow? What about hairstyles? Show the passing of time through these physical traits.

 

Chelsey-Clammer-FacultyChelsey Clammer received her MA in Women’s Studies from Loyola University Chicago and MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop program. She has been published in The Rumpus, Atticus Review, and The Nervous Breakdown among many others. She is an award-winning and Pushcart Prize nominated essayist. 

 

 

 

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Lesson No. 3: The Hermit Crab Essay

hermit crab teapot

 

 

Readings

 

Discussion

We have a story to tell and must find the right form in which to tell it. Or, we have a form we want to use and must find the right story with which to tell it. Chicken, meet egg. Egg, meet chicken. In the end, though, it doesn’t really matter which came first, just that something came, something appeared on the page. 

Now let’s look at that page. 

There are many ways to format an essay. 

One big block of text

 text examples

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Some fragments

 text examples

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And the delightfully weird

 text examples

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which leads us to the hermit crab essay. Hermit crab essays push you to find a form that will do the best justice to the story you want to tell. It will make you think about writing in a different way, and will ultimately make readers read differently, engage with your work in innovative ways. These elements will induce a deeper layer of meaning. What the hermit crab essay does is bring structure into the picture, to use the look of a text in such a way that the meaning of the text becomes even stronger. Sure, you can write an essay about the different ways in which the Department of Homeland Security is racist, but why not take its own official document and turn it into an officially kickass way to make this point?

 Form becomes a part of the essay, of the narrative, of that thing that reaches out to the reader and pulls her in. 

 Time for some examples.  

Reject the reject-er

 rejection letter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The crossword interview

 crossword interview

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And you can always index that shit

moson example

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so we have this great story to tell, and now we have all of these great structures with which we could tell it, and so now our job is to do some kneading, some molding, some shaping and some imagining. I mean, really, how can you understand the wide array of sexuality through a fake index for a fake book? It may sound absurd, but it works. It works because sexuality is all about defining who we are—which definition fits us—and an index is, in essence, a tool that helps to define and point to the important issues in a text. 

And then there’s also the why the hell not? factor. Why not write a lesbian manifesto out of offensive rap music? Why not use word problems similar to the ones found on math tests to tell the story of your dating history? Why not make warning labels that say something about your college experience? Why not use an academic calendar to talk about heartache?

Why?

Because why not?

We can create and tinker with various forms in order to say something more. Because this is not just about what story you are telling, but how you are showing that telling. Feeling a bit disjointed and non-emotional? Make a shopping list of your relationship with you mother. Feeling a bit slurred with a recent event? Make an outline of your problem. Feeling like your writing is stupid? Copy other authors’ quotes about writing and mix them together in order to get at what you’re feeling, what it is you really want to say. Let the words speak volumes of experiences and let the look of the text tether down that ultimate purpose—write differently so we can read differently. But really, we can do this just because.

  

Questions

  1. Previous to this workshop, if someone had tried to talk to you about how a reader moves spatially through an essay, what would have you thought? And now that you know about the importance of space in regards to writing, how would you describe this to a non-writer friend?
  2. What are two examples of how Ander Monson, in “Outline Toward a Theory of the Mine Versus the Mind and the Harvard Outline,” shifts through different topics and themes by making main points and then sub-points and then main points, again, and then etc? How does the structure help to elucidate Monson’s ideas?
  3. What do you think about the presence of metaphors in a hermit crab essay? How is this type of lyric essay dependent on metaphors to make its point? How is it not? And what about all of those digressions? Are they inherently a part of hermit crab essays?
  4. What are the ways in which Jill Talbot, in her essay “The Professor of Longing,” invite the reader to interact with her essay? 

 

Writing Exercises

  1. Use the Harvard Outline structure, write an essay about your family.
  2. Get driving directions from you home to your ex’s home, and use these directions as a way to discuss what happened to this relationship.
  3. Write an essay about depression in the form of a grocery list.
  4. Take this blank nutrition facts label, and fill in the information with the contents of your job duties and what your job means to you.
  5. Label each drawing on this sheet to tell the story of how you grew up, or that speaks to your relationship with your parents/guardians.

 

 

Weekly Deadlines

  • Saturday at 6pm:
    • All readings are to be completed
    • At least one discussion response posted in the forum below.
  • Sunday at 6pm:
    • Weekly draft of essay(s) (no more than 1000 words total) posted in the forum below.
  • Tuesday at 6pm
    • Chelsey will respond with feedback

 

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Lesson No. 2: The Braided Essay

Braid image

 

Readings

 

Discussion

In his visual craft essay “Picturing the Personal Essay,” Tim Bascom shows the various way a piece of writing can be organized in order to create a structure that heightens the overall narrative. He describes how writing can veer off into directions different from the writer’s initial intentions. Neat, huh? Because here we are with this perfectly structured and well-organized essay stewing in our heads, and then when we go to write it down it looks like a sprawling maze that doesn’t lead anywhere—at least not where we thought it would lead. This experience can lead to confusing thoughts of what, exactly, we’re trying to say. But it can also lead to something greater and more complex than our original idea. 

Key thing to remember: we might not know what we’re trying to say. 

And that’s okay. Go with the sprawling and see where it goes. One way to bring the endless maze into focus is to look at the main themes and/or narratives you have started to discuss in this essay zygote. Though something you will most likely start to see as you look at all of these disorganized elements is that there are some main strands of ideas running through the mess. What to do next? Enter: the braid. 

The structure of a braided essay is pretty basic: take at least three different narratives, break them up into different segments, and then organizing them by mixing them together. While basic, this type of essay isn’t necessarily an easy one to write. How can you get seemingly unrelated narratives to speak to one another? 

The key points to a braided essay are an overarching theme and juxtaposition. The success of the braided essay is dependent on how you use these elements in order to make three different narratives speak to one another. So get ready for some free-association. Think of it this way: you might not know what you want to say, but you can look at what you have already written or the different experiences you have/want to write about and see if there are any connecting images, words, phrases, ideas or even loosely-related events that can get these segments to speak to one another. You might have to tinker with the segments to get them into a dialogue. You might have to leave some segments out. Regardless of what you do or do not include, look at each segment as a separate entity, but also as part of a whole. Because this is what a braided essay is: disjointed thoughts juxtaposed in such a way as to create a connected narrative, a larger meaning. 

 

Questions

  1. What are the three strands of Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”? In what ways do they carry equal weight? In what ways do they not? And what do you think is the theme that connects these three topics together?
  2. The execution scene in Beard’s essay brings a type of disruption not just to the narrative, but to how that narrative is told through braiding together three story lines. In what ways does Beard begin to braid again, and how is this different from how she braided the strands before the execution scene?
  3. In “Prelude: The Box,” Eula Biss brings small segments from three different types of narratives into conversation with each other: quotes from family members, Biss’s own thoughts/reflections, an airplane’s black box. What theme(s) do you think bring these strands together? How do the narratives build on one another in order to fully examine the theme(s)?
  4. What are some of the moments in Biss’s essay in which you think the segments most affectively speak to one another?

 

Writing Exercises

  1. Blindly flip through the dictionary and  put your finger down three different times. Take the three words your finger landed on and write about what color has to do with each of them.
  2. Make a list of 5 objects you can see from where you are sitting right now. Cover that up and make a list of 5 different physical actions you have done so far today (walking, sitting, writing, etc.). Look at the lists, and write about each noun using at least one of the verbs you wrote down. Once you have a few sentences per noun, write a paragraph or sentence in between each segment that helps to connect them thematically or visually.
  3. Print out THIS document of opening paragraphs of famous novels and cut it up so that each paragraph is on its own slip of paper. Now take the paragraph bits and organize them in a way that makes sense to you.

 

Weekly Deadlines

  • Saturday at 6pm:
    • All readings are to be completed
    • At least one discussion response is to be posted to the FORUM below.
  • Sunday at 6pm:
    • Weekly draft of essay(s) (no more than 1000 words total) is to be posted to the FORUM below.
  • Tuesday at 6pm
    • Chelsey will respond with feedback

 

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