A long, thoughtful letter to an old friend, a reflection on
your education or ethnic heritage, a childhood
reminiscence--these could all be occasions for informal essays.
In writing, informality depends less on subject or structure than
on the overall
writing context. Informal essays assume a personal stance.
They suggest close connections among the writer, the reader, and
the subject.
Whatever the subject, and it could be almost anything, the writer
is part of it, perhaps the central figure exploring a personal
ritual or an Arctic island, maybe a background figure attending a
Grateful Dead concert or watching an elephant die. In any case,
we enter the writer's mind. We experience the writer's emotions.
It's a kind of writing that helps us learn who we are as people,
helps us define our values and clarify our vision.
Like fiction and poetry, informal essays are imaginative
excursions, and so, are sometimes called "creative
nonfiction." Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, George
Orwell, James Baldwin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Barry Lopez are
some writers of informal essays whose work you might know already
or enjoy discovering.
Informal essays are often written as stories that trace a
sequence of events from beginning to end with occasional
intervals of description or analysis.
The fundamental movement is forward in time, but with chances along the way to pause at points of interest. Remembering this, you won't feel you're getting sidetracked when folding in some description or explanation. Once you've finished a passage of analysis or description, you can come back to the time line and continue moving forward to the conclusion.
Sticking to a straightforward time order can also help you grasp your paper's overall shape. This is especially true in the early and middle stages of writing when you're more concerned with expanding and exploring possibilities than with shaping and rearranging what you've written. Later, however, as you get a feel for your essay's possibilities you may find that other organizational strategies can make your story more interesting and effective.
6.1 Spend twenty minutes sketching out a
draft of a story. Write quickly and try to get down the overall
flow of events. Follow events through from beginning to end in a
time order. Avoid mentioning concepts and emotions. Concentrate
on people, places, and unfolding events. Write on one of the
following topics, or pick one of your own: a time you took a
risk, a time your plans backfired, a time you learned something
important about your home town, a time you made a major change in
lifestyle, a time you acquired a new skill, a time you gave a
gift.
Whenever you write, you're presenting or disclosing information
to your readers, and just as it's essential to ask how much
information the reader wants or needs to know, it's also vital to
consider the order in which you'll give that information. These,
then, are two major considerations:
- How much information will I disclose about a particular subject, an injury for instance, during the course of my story?
- At what point in the course of my story will I divulge this information?
These two questions combine to produce a third:
- How much information about the subject do I want my reader to have at any particular point in the story?
By the end, the reader will understand that the doctor said my injury was not serious and I would recover quickly, but at the beginning I'll only describe the blood running over my lips. Then I'll tell about the slow, throbbing pain as I sat in the hospital emergency room. That way the reader will wonder, as I did, whether my nose was broken.
The point is to shape and control the flow of information to
your readers. While the straight time line is a good starting
point, most stories can be improved by experimenting with
disclosure strategies like those that follow.
Compression and expansion will help you control
the pacing and tempo of your essay. Actually, they aren't
separate techniques so much as parts of a single technique for
controlling the time flow. Even in real life, where the clock
moves with strict regularity, minutes can seem to drag on for
hours while whole weeks vanish in an instant. This
inner-time--fluid, variable, personal--can be simulated in
writing by intentionally focusing on key scenes and developing
them in great detail, while other, perhaps much longer periods
can be passed over in a few words:
When I stood to leave, my father continued looking down at his desk, as though lost in memory. He shuffled a few sheets of paper and then rearranged them carefully in an order that seemed more satisfying. When he finally looked up, I saw deep sadness in his eyes, as though they were trying to tell me something he couldn't speak of. The following spring, I came home again.
Here, a brief but important moment is expanded in the first
three sentences, while the last sentence compresses several
months into a few words.
This time-tested technique goes back at least as far as ancient
Greece, where Aristotle praised it as a way of opening stories up
fast and getting readers involved. We've seen that the actual
time in which events occurred need not correspond exactly to the
time devoted to them in the writing. Besides compressing and
expanding time, however, writers can move time around from one
place to another. 1945 can come before 1939. Christmas morning
can come before Christmas Eve. Spring break can even arrive
before midterm exams. Of course, too much disruption of normal
time order, or disruptions that are pointless or hard to follow,
can only weaken your organization and confuse your readers.
The key to success lies in knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it. Imagine the effect of taking an incident from one part of your story and placing it somewhere else:
Now we move the middle.
Beginning in the middle can allow you to hook your readers'
interest by bringing them into the story at a crucial point.
Then, once you have them hooked, you can flash back to the
beginning and fill in background information before moving
forward again to the ending. When using this technique, be sure
to signal your readers clearly when you move forward or backward
in time.
Experienced storytellers,whether professional writers or
old-timers around a pot-bellied stove, understand that suspense
keeps the attention level high. Creating and controlling
suspense, while never simple, becomes easier if you remember a
few basic concepts. As a writer, you intentionally create certain
expectations in your reader. Then you can either satisfy those
expectations, in which case the suspense disappears, or delay
satisfaction until the last possible moment, thereby intensifying
and prolonging the suspense.
It's like what children go through in the weeks leading up to
Christmas. Television, newspapers, schools, friends, and
relatives all create an atmosphere of expectation that something
important is about to happen--a holiday, presents, festivities,
celebration. Along with the expectation comes uncertainty. Will I
get everything I want? Will grandma like the present I bought
her? Will it snow?
This sense of expectation colored with uncertainty is the essence
of suspense. To create suspense in your readers, you hint at but
do not reveal exactly what is to come. Foreshadowing
refers to the hinting. Withholding Information refers to
the hiding.
Who hasn't seen this scene or some variation on television?
The Simpson family is about to go on a camping trip to the mountains, but at the last minute Homer finds he can't fit all the equipment and the dog into the family station wagon. While he goes inside to tell Marge, Bart decides to experiment with a new packing arrangement, in the process removing the spare tire and leaning it against the garage wall. When Marge comes out a few minutes later, she sees that there is indeed some space left and slips in the few remaining items. "Just needed a mother's knowhow,"' she says as they hop in and take off, the dog playfully hanging its head out the window. Then, as the car pulls away, we get a quick shot of the spare tire leaning against the garage wall.
Fortunately, not all foreshadowing is as obvious and corny as this, but even when it's this obvious, it often works. Every time the car goes around a curve or over a rocky road, the camera can zoom in on a tire.
So much for the foreshadowing. Where's the withholding? Don't
we know that the family will get a flat tire at some
crucial point? Probably so, although more sophisticated writers
sometimes set up false leads along with good ones, making readers
guess which hints are important. Even in a situation like the one
above, several unanswered questions remain. How will it happen? When and where will it happen?
Imagine, if you can, that while Homer is outside trying to load
the car, Marge is inside talking with Lisa, who doesn't want to
go camping at all because she has a saxophone concert scheduled
for Sunday afternoon. "Don't worry," Marge assures her,
"we'll be back in plenty of time." Now we have two
stories, which are in a sense separate, yet are intertwined like
braided strands of rope.
And while this is a fictional example, real life works that
way, too. Every individual story is made up of other stories that
overlap and interconnect in interesting ways. If you can identify
these strands and see how they interrelate, you can use them to
add texture to your essay, shifting like a movie camera from one
story to another, yet making sure the reader sees how the stories
entwine.
Wait a minute, you may be thinking. Who needs tension? Isn't that
what causes headaches and ulcers? Why create more of that? These
are good questions and deserve answers.
Writers use tension and opposition to discover
and explore the texture of experience. Most experience contains
opposition, which often produces tension, and not all tension is
bad, and not all opposition is conflict. In fact, the poet
William Blake went so far as to say, "Opposition is true
Friendship." He meant that opposition produces energy and
excitement, sometimes even harmony.
What would a tennis match or a horse race be without opposition?
An election? A romance? Even a guitar string isn't good for much
until it is put under tension by being pulled in two opposite
directions, but when it's taut, the slightest touch can produce
the most marvelous sounds. Likewise, using opposition to control
your essay's dynamic tension can add energy and vigor to your
writing.
Tension in writing takes many forms and serves many purposes. It can grow out of opposition between people, between people and their surroundings, between hopes and realities, between tradition and change. A single piece of writing can use several kinds of tension, exploring their interrelationships. As a writer, you should learn to recognize tension, to build it, to control and release it according to your purposes.
You might begin by looking at some of your own writing to see where you've used oppositions or where you could have created more dynamic tension by developing oppositions more fully. Ask questions like the following:
- Does this go against what a person would normally expect?
Example: Forrest is terrible in math, but he's getting an 'A' in algebra.
- Does this seem out of place in these surroundings?
Example: I noticed that the beautician kept scratching her scalp.
- Does there seem to be an internal contradiction?
Example: In order to find yourself you have to lose yourself.
- Is this part of a pair of natural opposites?
Example: The grapefruit juice was bitterly sour after the platter of syrupy pancakes.
- Is this a challenge or a struggle?
Example: My father announced that he would catch the pig bare-handed.
- Is this part of a contest?
Example: Jordan and Barkley glared at each other across the centerline.
- Does the language itself suggest opposition?
Example: Do you mean to suggest that the honorable senator from the great state of Texas is a filthy crook?
- Is an important change being made or contemplated?
Example: After January 15th, all of us who couldn't do twenty-five pushups would have to wear yellow gym shorts.
This is just a partial list of possible kinds of oppositions,
but it should help get you going on your own.
- Is something funny going on at the same time as something sad?
- Is something trivial going on at the same time as something important?
Once you develop the knack of spotting oppositions, you'll have acquired a valuable technique for adding energy and force to your writing. The more experienced you get at exploring, extending, and interrelating oppositions, the more lively and engaging your writing will become.
6.2 Read back over the story draft you wrote
for Activity 6.1. Look for ways to experiment
with the information flow to your readers. Some techniques you
can use are Compression
and Expansion, Beginning in
the Middle and Flashing Back, Foreshadowing
and Withholding Information, Thickening the Plot, Using Tension and
Opposition. Use them alone or in combination to shape
your narrative so that it achieves your purposes and satisfies
your readers. Write yourself a note describing at least two
changes, you could make in your first draft. Tell how you could
incorporate these changes and how they might alter the story's
overall effect.
A good story is made of more than events. Stories introduce us to
people we've never met, take us to places we've never been. They
show us how events change people and how people change events.
They lift us, however briefly, out of our own world and let us
experience another, the world of the story, complete with uncles,
cats, blizzards, draperies, bananas--whatever the writer chooses
to include.
If you have a sense of your story's overall flow of events, you may be able to spot places where you can pause to fold in some details about the people involved and the place where the story happening. If you're not sure what to write, use The Journalist's Questions or Dramatism to spark ideas.
6.3 Freewrite
for 10 minutes on one of the people and for 10 minutes on one of
the places involved in the story you drafted you for Activity
6.1. When you finish writing, look back over the draft
for spots where you could fold in some of this freewriting.
As a writer, you can tell your reader that your uncle was
a careful and methodical person, or you can show your
uncle at his mitre saw in coveralls, goggles, and work gloves.
You can tell your reader that your new apartment looked
cold and sterile, or you can show the bare white walls and
recently shampooed carpet, the uncurtained windows that looked
out over an empty, snow-covered parking lot.
"The action speaks for itself," we sometimes say, implying that no explanation is needed. We know explanations can be useful sometimes, but we know, too, that events themselves are often more dramatic and revealing than any explanation. When you show the people, places, and happenings in your story, you're allowing your reader to enter into the actual texture of events themselves, to feel, see, hear, hear, taste, and smell what it was like to be present.
Often a single, well-chosen detail--close-bitten fingernails or a half-buttoned, black silk shirt--will show your reader more about your subject that a full paragraph of explanation and will be more convincing and memorable as well.
6.4 Look back over the story draft you wrote
for Activity 6.1 and note any places you've used
telling rather than showing to get your point
across. In each case, try to recall the concrete details of the
scene itself. Write them down, paying special attention to any
details that caused you to think or feel as you did about the
situation.
Most narrative writing is organized along some variation of a
time order. Understanding this, you have a good sense of
direction during the early stages of your writing process. This
sense of a story line along which you're moving also serves as a
point of reference when you fold in passages of description or
explanation.
For a variety of reasons, writers often depart from this
strict chronological sequence and adopt another strategy of
organization. In doing this, writers make decisions about the
kinds and amounts of information that they want readers to have
at various points in the story.
As you make decisions about the final form of your story, then,
you should remember that one important difference between your
story about an event and the event itself is that you control the
flow of information your readers receive.
Activity
6.5 Write a second draft of the story you began
for Activity 6.1. Again, write quickly, but this time include any
changes you've been considering. When you finish, get some
response to your draft and write another.
A quiltmaker looks at scraps of cast-off fabric strewn about the
attic floor and sees a design. Something--some juxtaposition of
red next to lavender, some connection of past and
present--triggers an impulse, starts an intuitive process. In the
end, the quilt is both many and one--many individual pieces and
one single object. An artist looks at a shoelace, a matchbook, a
speeding ticket, and sees a collage, connections that ask to be
made, a statement that wants to emerge.
In writing, a similar process can happen. Seemingly disconnected thoughts and images, facts and memories, can be juxtaposed, lifted out of their original contexts and reassembled into a new whole, a single statement. Ezra Pound wrote poetry this way. He referred to his Cantos as a "ragbag" stuffed with bits and scraps of whatever he encountered that seemed to belong there. The final effect is a sort of verbal montage like you've seen in the movies--slow fade, voiceover, wide pan, jump cut, close up.
To experiment with this approach to writing, you might begin
with a series of quick freewrites,
collect notes and quotations at random. You could save them under
different filenames, print them out, scatter them around the
floor, cut them up and tape them back together. You could look
for tension and contrast in language, recurring themes, emerging
patterns of meaning. Then you could merge it all back into a
single document and continue to cut, paste, and move. There's no
"right" way to do it, no list of steps to follow.
If you're looking for a way to push your essays beyond rational,
linear thinking, you may want to try assembling a montage. The
process is intuitive and holistic. It requires imagination,
improvisation, and a willingness to experiment.
6.6 Assemble a one-page montage containing at least four of the following:
Experiment with different sequences and juxtapositions until
you see a pattern emerging. Then work with the pattern, cutting
and pasting, adding and deleting, until you're satisfied with the
result.
A metaphor makes a comparison, and in doing so shapes our
perception of the subject. If we say, "Time is a
river," we're noting certain points of similarity between
the two. Yet we know they aren't identical. We may mean that time
is fluid, has currents and eddies, empties into some vast ocean,
but not that it's composed of water. If we say, "Time is a
stone," we may mean that it's silent, still, indifferent,
but not that it's a mineral.
A metaphor has two parts: a tenor and a vehicle. The tenor ("time" in the example above) is the subject of the comparison, and the vehicle ("a river," "a stone") is the image to which the subject is being compared. And even though we know the metaphor's two parts aren't identical, so close is their association that something of the vehicle rubs off and influences our perception of the tenor. For instance, instead of merely starting a new computer program, we can now click a mouse on a hotspot and open a window.
Because of this power to shape perception, metaphors are important to writers. While novice writers tend to see metaphors as ornamental or decorative, more experienced writers use them structurally, sometimes extending and exploring a single metaphor throughout an entire work. Occasionally such an extended metaphor will be submerged. That is, the vehicle will be only partially visible beneath the surface of the writing. For instance, notice how, in the two previous sentences, writing (the tenor) is compared to a lake or pool (the submerged vehicle).
You might experiment by using metaphor to clarify central concepts or to connect parts of an entire essay. You might also find it useful to think metaphorically about the overall planning and design of an informal essay. For instance:
This essay will be a thunderstorm: first a sunny sky with a few light clouds and some stirring of leaves, then a sudden drop in air pressure as the clouds join and build into thunderheads (driving rain, thunderclaps, lightning), brief but intense and frightening until the storm blows off east and leaves behind a few broken tree limbs, water flowing down the streets, the grass green and vibrant, the air moist and cool.
6.7 Write up an extended metaphor like the
example above, describing an essay you'd like to write or are
currently working on. Try submerging the extended metaphor in the
essay itself by incorporating specific images and details
whenever appropriate.
As writers, we're often advised to "stick to the topic"
and "get to the point." This is usually good advice,
but not always. Sometimes it leads to writing that's shallow and
one-dimensional, as though the writer had prematurely closed down
the process of inquiry, just to produce something neat and tidy
with no madwoman in the attic.
One antidote to this obsession with order and purpose is Freewriting, which is almost by definition chaotic and open-ended. When freewriting, you follow your language and thinking wherever they lead without regard for the consequences.
If you've had good results with freewriting, you may want to carry the process even further by freewriting around the subject, or by forgetting about a subject entirely until one emerges from your writing. You may get so lost in the act of writing that you're almost in a trance, a meditative state, a place where the words write you. Sound mystical? Maybe so, but poets, for centuries, have spoken of "the muse," the voice of poetic inspiration that speaks to and through them in their work.
Follow the stream of your consciousness, tap into your internal language. If a voice leaps up and says, "No!" engage that voice. Challenge it. Enter it. Let the subject find you.
Will you revise this later? Almost certainly. You'll move or expand some parts, cut others. Almost all writing needs revision, and this free-ranging approach may need more than other, more formulaic and pragmatic approaches, but it can also yield richer, more satisfying results.
6.8 Freewrite
for ten minutes, allowing yourself to range freely over whatever
images and subjects offer themselves. When you finish, go back
over your freewrite and highlight four key words or images. Now
do four more ten-minute freewrites, using the highlighted words
and images as springboards. Again, let the writing go where it
will. When you finish, read back over all five drafts. Try
cutting and pasting them together into a single short essay.
Beginnings serve two important purposes. The first is to get you
started writing. The second is to get your readers
started reading. Early in your writing you're concerned more with
the first purpose: getting off to a good start, maybe with enough
push to carry you into the heart of the essay. Yet the beginning
that gets you going won't always be best for getting your reader
involved. That's okay. You can take care of that later, after
you've seen how the essay is taking shape.
The important thing at the start is to get going. If you remember
that those first few words you write may never be seen by anyone
but you, you'll be able to see that starting point as an entry
into your writing process.
Just like entering a cool, clear lake for a swim, there's no
single right way to begin. Some people test the water and wade in
slowly. Others just plunge right in and start splashing away.
Either way, you get wet.
Sometimes a particular word or phrase--"sheepeater" or "dead as a fritter"--may give you the nudge you need to get going, serving as a center of exploration. Maybe a powerful image--your cousin bursting with pride after winning the high jump in the Special Olympics--will spur you to start. You may sense a design or organizational pattern that you are being drawn into completing. Whatever gets you going generally turns out to be just what you needed.
When you're trying to get started, don't be too critical of whatever beginning offers itself. Later, when you're revising, however, you should look critically and suspiciously at your opening. It isn't unusual to find that the first paragraph of the first draft of an informal essay can be lopped off completely with nothing much lost. Cruel and unfeeling as it may seem, the best way to a good opening is often to take one last long look at your original beginning and chop it.
Such radical surgery isn't always the answer, however. The essential requirement is to open smoothly and quickly, to draw your readers into the essay itself, not into an explanation of why you're writing or of what the essay might prove.
If you still don't feel sure about your paper's opening, one final suggestion may help. The seed of a good beginning is often contained in the ending. Think of your ending as a goal, a destination, a place you're working toward. Ask what it is about this point that makes you want to end here rather than somewhere else. Now read back over the essay as a whole and look for a possible starting point, some word, image, or incident that connects with the ending.
Sooner or later, you need to ask: what is it that makes all these ideas and images belong in a single essay? You won't know the answer when you begin writing. But as the essay takes shape, you should start to see what you're working toward, what it is about this subject that makes you want to write about it, what point you have to get across before the essay's promise is fulfilled.
Having reached that point, you should be able to look back over your writing and find the beginning. If you can do that, your readers, when they reach the end of your paper, should feel a sense of satisfaction and closure. The point should be clear, the cycle complete. Nothing should remain to be said.
6.9 Read the opening and closing of your most recent draft of an informal essay. Does your opening contain unnecessary explanation that could be deleted or replaced by vivid, concrete imagery? Does your ending introduce a new topic or try too hard to drive home a point that you've already made? What reader expectations does your opening set up? Have these expectations been satisfied by the closing? Rework the opening and closing of your essay and then write a draft that's ready for final editing.