“Chapter Nine: Forms”
CHAPTER NINE
Forms
The chapters in this section on creative nonfiction began with a discussion of genre, pointing out a few differences between and among essays, stories, and poems. I’ve attempted to free the essay genre from some of the preconceived notions you may have harbored about it, arguing that it is just as artful as fiction or poetry. This final chapter will explore some of the subgenres within the genre of creative nonfiction, offering a few specific examples, and inviting you to try your hand at the wide variety of traditional or experimental forms.
A word of caution, however: as with every lesson in this textbook, whether we’re discussing point of view, enjambment, or imagery, as an artist, you will find that you’re often not making conscious decisions about the elements of your writing so much as working toward your craft choices instinctively. So it goes with the following forms. You might indeed be inspired by the formal innovations you observe in a specific essay and attempt something similar on your own. On the other hand, you might also need to discover the final form of your work while in the midst of writing. There is no set path to arrive at art. When generating material, you may find that a poem suddenly morphs into an essay, or an essay into a short story, or a story into something you’ve never seen before. The same is true when writing creative nonfiction. Your flash nonfiction may expand, your braided essay unravel, your hermit crab essay escape its shell to find a new home elsewhere. Regardless, it will be helpful for you to have a sense of the wide variety of forms available to you as you write and revise your own creative nonfiction.
Flash Nonfiction
Flash nonfiction is usually defined as an essay of no more than a thousand words that offers a brief “flash” of illumination on a single topic, experience, or phenomenon. Because of its brevity, flash nonfiction will necessarily be compressed and very narrowly focused. The very well-respected, long-running online magazine Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, founded and edited by Dinty. W. Moore, has done much to legitimize and popularize flash nonfiction in the literary world. In fact, many of the writers in this textbook have also published essays in Brevity: Traci Brimhall (“There But For the Grace of God,” “Post-Mortem”), Paul Crenshaw (“Foundation,” “Shock and Awe”), Jennifer Gravley (“White Space: An Annotation”), Lance Larsen (“A Brief History of Water,” “Tired,” “The Bluest Eye”), Brandon R. Schrand (“The Essay and the Art of Equivocation”), and Brooke Wonders (“Come Back, Jimmy Dean”).
Gabriella Souza’s “Connection” is a prime example of flash nonfiction. Weighing in at just under a thousand words, the essay focuses tightly on a very narrow window of time when the author is having a conversation with a man in a Mexico City airport before boarding their plane. While very little action takes place and nothing dramatic occurs, the title gives the reader a sense of the significance we’re meant to be alert to. She and the man share many things in common, including a similarity of names (Gabriella and Gabriel), kinship with animals, and fake teeth, but the connections between them eventually give way to tension as they ride a shuttle to their plane: “He places his strong right hand on my arm. I tense. Perhaps I’ve given the wrong message. Still, I don’t pull back.” This piece of flash nonfiction does not linger very long in any specific scene, summarizing much of the dialogue in the narrative mode in order to move forward more quickly. The end of the essay returns to an image from the beginning: an earthquake Gabriella sees in a cartoon on the plane, echoing the earthquake Gabriel told her he had dreamt about. The “connection” between these two strangers has been severed forever, and the reader is left with a feeling of impending doom as Wile E. Coyote is “flattened, impaled, blown to bits” before “the earth drops from underneath him.” There is a clear beginning, middle, and end in this essay, but there is not much in the way of plot. Flash nonfiction often carries its significance through suggestion or metaphor. In this case, Souza offers a snapshot of a brief encounter with a stranger, highlighting the ephemerality of the connection between them.
Another excellent example of a flash essay is Taylor Brorby’s “Confluence,” which is not bound by time the way Souza’s “Connection” is. Rather, it focuses on a specific geographical place where the Yellowstone and Missouri Rivers meet in North Dakota, the author’s home state. Brorby moves back and forth through time rapidly, leaping hundreds—and even thousands of years—through geological eras to describe how “a glacier pressed and pushed sediment, rolled rocks against mud, against water, and changed the course of these rivers.” The essay settles into specific vivid moments taking place at the confluence, portraying pelicans sunning themselves and imagining oneself lying down in the rivers. As is common in flash nonfiction, these lyrical moments take on even more significance because we only get quick glimpses. Another scene showing men fishing for paddlefish doesn’t explain itself so much as suggest by juxtaposition the relationship between humans and these rivers. Finally, Brorby’s voice enters the essay to explain rather than show the significance of the confluence for him:
This place contains story—a story of two men sent by a redheaded president in search of the watery Northwest Passage. A story of a seventy-million-year-old fish that sucks and slurps zooplankton. And a story of convergence, of joining, of Confluence.
The stories contained in the confluence carry ancient, historical, but also personal meaning for Brorby, as the place “serves as the best framework to understand myself.” The confluence is important both literally and figuratively, as a phenomenon that resonates symbolically, suggesting that there may be places in the world that hold similarly important significance for us.
Writing Prompt
Write a flash essay that narrowly focuses either on a specific span of time or on a specific place that is meaningful to you. Be on the lookout for metaphorical and/or symbolic significance. Challenge yourself by limiting your essay to 500-750 words while still clearly developing a beginning, middle, and end.
The Braided Essay
The braided essay develops two or more different ideas or narratives that alternate and move forward together until the end. Imagine this form containing multiple threads or strands that you are wrapping artfully around one another to create an overall effect: thus the braid. Each thread might stand alone, but in juxtaposition with the other threads, it both gives and receives more meaning. The braided essay has become very popular in recent years, likely because the arrangement of the threads places sometimes unlikely pieces of information next to one another, revealing insights or suggesting truths that might otherwise have never been discovered. Naomi J. Williams writes humorously and instructively about having grown tired of the braided essay in “Braids: A Braided Essay About Braids & Braided Essays.” Even so Williams recognizes the power of the form: “Here’s the thing about any successfully braided thing: It’s an object of beauty. The heft of a braid in the hand. That taut, satiny smoothness. The visual pleasure of the weave. The sensuous strength of the strands holding each other in place.”
Esinam Bediako embraces the form, announcing it in the title of her essay “Body/Mind Braid,” which weaves together two separate but related strands. The first strand follows the narrative of her pregnancy. Bediako suffers the stress of morning sickness, news that she would need a C-section because her uterus had been damaged from fibroid surgery, news that she was a carrier for the Tay-Sachs gene, and microaggressions from co-workers. In the second strand, she describes experiences from her past that have shaped her body image in both racialized and sexualized ways, from being called an “ugly African” by her African American classmates, to being called “a dog” with “big boobs” who was “gonna be a slut one day” by middle school boys. These taunts led to Bediako shutting down, hiding herself and her body from the world. Where the two strands intersect, we see the greater significance as the doctor corrects her assumption that breathing “helps you detach from pain and other distractions.” Rather, breathing is “not about detaching from your body. It’s actually the opposite. It’s the most present you can be.” The essay ends optimistically as she holds her infant son with a newfound sense of wholeness and presence.
Because of its brevity, William Stobb’s “Doom” can be considered a piece of flash nonfiction, too, but it’s instructive for our purposes to demonstrate how you can braid an essay even if it’s very brief, in this case only a little over eight hundred words. At first glance, you might call “Doom” a kind of collage essay, which simply places fragmented pieces next to one another, allowing the reader to infer meaning through juxtaposition. This technique is similar to the braid, but the effect is subtly different. The braided essay picks up its strands later rather than letting them sit by themselves as individual pieces. “Doom” focuses very squarely on the concept of doom and Stobbs’ experiences of it. The one reliable strand in the essay follows the author watching the beginning of Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey on his laptop, from the opening music to the monolith scene where an ape “is able to imagine using a large bone to bludgeon another creature and then immediately does so and becomes human.” The other strands are shorter, not random but undeveloped beyond a short paragraph: a description of the first-person shooter game Doom, the feeling that humanity is doomed, the origin story of the Marvel villain Doctor Doom, the etymology of the word doom in English. The end diverges from reality as Stobb extrapolates from the etymology, cinematically imagining the death scene of a tenth-century Viking.
Writing Prompt
Write three paragraphs about separate but related things. If one of your paragraphs tells the story of something that happened to you, write another two paragraphs that fill in related backstory about your life. If one of your paragraphs is about a specific concept or phenomenon, write another two paragraphs that look at it from different perspectives or in different contexts.
The Lyric Essay
The lyric essay has one obvious defining characteristic: it’s written primarily in the lyrical mode. As we briefly discussed in an earlier chapter, the lyrical mode is writing that pays close attention to the sound of language. It can coincide with either the dramatic mode in scenes or in the narrative mode during summary or exposition. An analysis of this textbook’s anthology would reveal that every piece of writing contains some elements (phrases, sentences, passages) that are in the lyrical mode. The lyric essay, therefore, is not a difference in kind but in degree. Because it often blurs the line between poetry and prose, the lyric essay can be considered a hybrid form. In fact, the lyric essay usually overlaps with one or more of the forms you will find in this chapter. Lyric essays tend to be brief, but they pack a punch as the lyrical mode lingers, lifting the reader from the mundane into a realm of greater significance. The lyrical mode itself signals this greater significance, therefore demanding that we pay close attention.
Wendy Gaudin’s “Beauty” is a lyric essay par excellence. As the author explains in “On ‘Beauty’,” the essay is inspired by the beauty of Louisiana Creole women as they appeared in family narratives: “Beauty as a trait became embodied in a character, a woman who is a common ancestor to us all.” We witness the origin of this character and follow her story through time, but Gaudin never stops to explain the many references, from geographical locations to the names of slave ships. Nor does she dwell too long in any single moment. In fact, the reader cannot piece together a singular narrative because the narrative is not singular. It would also be hard to pinpoint specific scenes that are allowed to develop. Rather, the lyric essay encompasses the many different manifestations of Beauty, derived from “three main historical phenomena: the trade in slaves by settlers to Louisiana, the displacement of Louisiana's indigenous people, and the creative, ingenious ways of overcoming suffering practiced by enslaved people themselves. We are settler/indigenous/slave all at the same time.”
The essay opens biblically, as though establishing a creation story, “In the beginning,” sweeping across the land and showing “Beauty in the four directions.” It’s worthwhile to pause and admire the lyricism:
Beauty in the frigid and pale north where the pelican and the egret blend into the glittery frost; Beauty in the scorched and dark south where turtles take their sweet time, stewing in the faithful heat, and alligators swirl in shiny hot waters; Beauty in the rising plenty of the east, wet with the dew of eternal early mornings, of baby whistling ducks and cackling geese forever in their fluffy, untested feathers; Beauty in the dry and aging west, as gray-haired red wolves say goodnight, goodnight.
The rhythms are carried along by the repetition of “Beauty in the,” each part containing vivid images of landscape and wildlife. Gaudin renders the creation myth of America itself, ending with “Mother Mississippi, the water that birthed us all.”
The landscape gets more specific as we encounter “Cane River and Bayou Tech, the Bogue Falaya and the Tunica Hills,” and we follow a history of colonization in the region from the Gulf of Mexico up the Mississippi. The main character is enmeshed but not bound by history as the essay moves through time and space to trace not only the story of Beauty herself but also the destructive force of “desire for Beauty” animating history, which “followed her like a scent.” The essay ends with another destructive force, hatred of Beauty: “Those white women on stately porches and riding in calfskin carriages: they hated them some Beauty.” Barely over eight hundred words, this exquisite lyric essay proves that brief work can nevertheless cover a lot of ground.
Writing Prompt
Write the narrative of a region you know well, creating a composite character that allows you to move through time and space quickly, tracing history but diverging as needed. Include as many historical allusions as you need to, but be sure to develop specific vivid images as well. Throughout the writing, pay close attention to the rhythms of your sentences and the quality of your syllables, employing repetition of both sound and syntax to help the work cohere lyrically.
The Hermit Crab Essay
Because hermit crabs are born without shells, they survive by living in the emptied shells of other animals, like snails. Their names are derived from seeming like a hermit hiding in their shells like a cave. Like the crab itself, the hermit crab essay goes out in search of another “shell” in which to live, borrowing a form from another kind of text as a new container. As Brenda Miller explains in “The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study,” this new container, is not neutral. Whether it’s in the form of “a ‘to-do’ list, or a field guide, or a recipe,” it’s important to discover “what kind of content that form suggests. This is the essential move: allowing form to dictate content.” Miller demonstrates finding her content in her hermit crab essay “We Regret To Inform You,” which takes the form of a series of rejection notes. At first the notes are somewhat light, but they eventually take a turn toward the more vulnerable. Whatever form you might select, don’t follow the structure away from your own life experiences. Rather, follow it toward something real, something honest, something only you could write.
Jennifer Gravley’s “Proposing a World without a Mother: Grief and Creative Nonfiction as a Sense-Making Tool” is a good model for developing content within a form as a way to discover something personally meaningful. This self-referential essay explains its own design:
Because this comparison [between grief theory and creative writing] took place within the form of a proposal for an academic essay, I now utilize this received form as a way to integrate the research with my personal narrative. The narrative is interspersed, it interrupts, exemplifies, and perhaps contradicts the proposal. The form of the proposal is doubly fitting because the work of storytelling in grief is to “propose” a new world, a new self.
Not only does the proposal format contain the personal narrative, it helps to process the grieving process that Gravley is experiencing. The juxtaposition of academic language with italicized passages of expressive writing is jarring, which is precisely the point. For instance, note the tone of the following sentence: “It is assumed that the loss of a parent is a sad event that produces intense grief and takes a significant amount of time, probably the rest of the bereaved individual’s life, to process.” This kind of writing attempts to be objective, detaching itself from the experience of grief itself. Compare the effect of this academic writing with the panic and emotion of the following scene:
You were there for her last breath but didn’t realize it was her last at the time—you can only ever realize after, in the absence of another. Your sister was frantic on the phone with the hospice nurse. You were desperately trying to open the little bottle of morphine, which you were dripping into her feeding tube not for pain, because she complained of none the whole day, but to help relax the panic of not being able to breathe. Afterward, her face looked plastic, waxen, changed colors. Her eyes stayed a tiny bit open.
Because it is couched within the proposal, this scene feels more visceral, more honest, a peek behind the facade of the controlled academic discourse. The proposal itself begins to feel like a coping mechanism, the same way Gravley admits to practicing writing the word mother rather than momma “because it furthered the distance that writing already puts between writer and event.” She develops the trappings of the proposal (Thesis Statement, Review of Literature, Methodology, and so on), allowing it to reveal a genuine insight into writing and grieving: “Writing is in fact a form of preservation of self,” she explains, admitting that writing this hermit crab essay was “the only way to live with or through anything—construct a story about it. And like all writing—revise. Find comfort in form, structure, pattern, indulge in breaking it.” In the end, because “Remembering overrides memories,” her advice, to us and herself, is to “Tell yourself the story until you are in it.” Gravley not only found comfort in form, but she also found words that allowed readers to identify with and understand their own experiences of grief.
Writing Prompt
Make a list of as many textual forms as you can that might be an appropriate container for a hermit crab essay. Tax return, Instagram post, resume, dating app profile, artist statement, crossword puzzle, classified ad, LLM prompt. Ask yourself what content is suggested by this form. What emotions, memories, and experiences are adjacent to this form? Now write an essay that cleaves to this form while developing something real, honest, and possibly vulnerable.
The List
The list essay defines itself: an essay that is a list. You might consider the list essay a subset of the hermit crab essay. The difference is that lists are much more general than the hermit crab forms tend to be. You can list anything: fugitives, groceries, Communists, children who are naughty or nice. Lists might be tightly focused on a specific topic, or they might be broadly thematic. They might be chronological or ahistorical. You have a lot of freedom when writing a list essay. In “To Do or Not To Do: On the Comfort of List Essays,” Jill Kolongowski touts the virtues of the list essay, namely the ease with which a list can “put a small bit of sense in the senseless.” A list suggest order, perhaps even priority. “The list essay is what I use to get unstuck,” admits Kolongowski. “When narrative or plot or sense seem impossible, there are still rhythms, juxtapositions, and crescendos worthy of consideration.” The list is forgiving. It takes the pressure off as you’re writing.
Lucienne S. Bloch’s “365 New Words a Year: October” is a very ordered chronological list that presents all thirty-one words appearing on her word of the day desk calendar, from eristic to skookum. Following each entry, Bloch writes a miniature essay anywhere from fifty to four hundred words. These brief vignettes respond sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely to each of the words. For instance, in response to the word mumpsimus (“a person who clings obstinately to an exposed error in practice or expression”), she describes a wedding invitation she received by email rather than a proper printed one. She sent a gift but had not yet received a thank you note in return. Bloch laments “the prolapse of civility,” but the implication is that she suspects that she might, indeed, be the mumpsimus in question. In a brief poignant entry, she responds to the word concinnity ( “a close harmony; a blending”) by explaining how she sometimes enters her old childhood room in her mother’s apartment, where her father died, “just to be me in a mix of tenses, among them the past, the historical present, the future perfect, the past continuous, and the durative.” This harmonious blending is similar to the overall effect of the essay itself, each piece resonating with the others. Another entry, responding to scoon (“to skip across water like a flat stone”), seems to speak to the design of the list essay: “These anecdotal fragments are dots on grids of ifs: possibilities of given words. I bingo or I don’t. Either way, it's a little breather before I tackle the taller orders of the day.” The overall effect of the scooning concinnity of Bloch’s list of words is not a portrait of the stubborn mumpsimus but someone who is open to discover new things about her past and present self, and the world she inhabits.
The daring title of Samantha Edmonds’s “An Incomplete List of Sad Beautiful Things that Almost but Don’t Quite Manage to Make Clear to Me How Anyone Continues to Love Anything Knowing Someday It Will All Be Gone” gets your attention by its sheer length, but it also signals what to expect from the writing that follows, namely a list essay that is tinged with items that are poignant, i.e., “sad and beautiful.” You might think this essay is only a list of six individual things (the Sweat, smell of fish, clinic waiting rooms, birdseed, and so on), but Edmonds includes allusions to phrases and ideas appearing elsewhere, the final item bringing everything together through her “second pack of cigarettes in four hours,” during which the beautiful sadness culminates in a fearful confrontation of mortality. The author readily admits in the title that her list is incomplete—she could’ve included many more sad beautiful things—but the reader doesn’t have a sense that it could go on and on forever because it resolves itself so definitively, so beautifully.
Writing Prompt
Make a list of things that will allow you to find some deeper personal significance beyond the items themselves. It might be a list of your favorite songs when you were a kid, a list of reasons why you’re a night person or morning person, a list of imaginary animals you’ve invented, a list of exes and their character traits (or flaws), a list of gifts you wish you’d gotten at Christmas. The list can be anything. The structure of putting one thing after the other is a heuristic that will allow you to generate new material. Once you have a list you’re satisfied with, try to find patterns and organize the items to enhance the experience you want the reader to have.
Experiments on the Page
Finally, your creative nonfiction need not be bound by the conventions of printed prose. Like poets, essayists can play around with the arrangement of words on the page itself. If you think of the page as a canvas on which you are painting your words, you might discover great creative freedom that will lead you to places you hadn’t anticipated. One way to experiment is to play with specific textual elements that are not often associated with literary writing, like footnotes. Lee Ann Roripaugh’s “Notes on Beauty” uses footnotes to great effect, offering asides and background information while maintaining the forward momentum of the essay. In fact, the footnotes almost become another essay unto themselves. Other ideas might include changing the size of your font strategically, or using superscripts or subscripts so that some words appear higher than other words. Most word processing software nowadays allows you to play around with the colors of your words, and you might find a reason to experiment with shades of gray so that words seem to shimmer, half-erased, disappearing. If you’re more technically inclined, you might also use software like Adobe Photoshop or InDesign to create visual effects with your text.
The key is that playing with the page in these ways could come across as a gimmick if you don’t allow the experiment to inform your writing. If you’re writing about being color blind, changing the font color could be thematically interesting. If you’re writing about ethical “gray areas,” changing the shade of the font might work well. Lauren Osborn’s “Hole” experiments with the page in a very successful and straightforward way, creating a striking shape in the middle of her text. The hole that appears on the page is not a gimmick at all. Rather, the essay addresses various holes, beginning with the author’s mother having “discovered a hole in her abdomen, right beside her belly button.” The essay leaps from one instance of a hole in the author’s life or consciousness to another, each separated by the appearance of a slash: a hole in a favorite sweater, a black hole, a peephole. Osborn returns more than once to the hole in her mother’s abdomen, but nothing is resolved. Instead, after having mused on stigmata and imagining holes in her own hand, the essay ends with a suggestive image: “I’m holding a silver sliver of knife against my palm, boring down until the skin on my heartline splits, deepens. Another emptiness to fill.” Rather than spelling things out directly, Osborn cleverly allows the reader to fill the holes in this essay.
Writing Prompt
Write a paragraph of autobiographical prose, describing a vivid memory or important moment in your life. Print the paragraph out on paper and cut each individual word out. Push the words around on the page until you find a satisfying arrangement that somehow informs the writing itself. Alternatively, use word processing or graphic design software to play around with your paragraph, changing the size, shape, and/or color of words to create specific effects. Allow this individual paragraph to spark an idea for a longer essay like Roripaugh’s or Osborn’s.
Attributions
"365 New Words a Year: October" excerpt by Lucienne Bloch, 2010, is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.
"Beauty," by Wendy Gaudin, 2016, North American Review, 301 (4), p. 3 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44601256) is reprinted with permission.. All Rights Reserved.
"Body/Mind Braid," by Esinam Bediako, 2023, North American Review, 308 (1), pp. 98-101 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27223643) is reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved.
"Braids: A Braided Essay About Braids & Braided Essays," excerpt by Naomi J. Williams, 2021, The Brevity Blog is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. Copyright law.
"Confluence," by Taylor Brorby, 2021, North American Review, 302(4), p. 42 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/44601414) is reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved.
"Connection," by Gabriella Souza, 2021, North American Review, 306 (2), pp. 24-25 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27152930) is reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved.
"Hole," by Lauren Osborn, 2022, North American Review, 307 (2), pp. 14-15 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27152867), is reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved.
"Proposing a World without a Mother: Grief and Creative Nonfiction as a Sense-Making Tool," by Jennifer Gravley, 2016, North American Review, (https://northamericanreview.org/online/2016/proposing-world-without-mother-grief-and-creative-nonfiction-sense-making-tool) is reprinted with permission. All Rights Reserved.
“The Shared Space Between Reader and Writer: A Case Study,” by Brenda Miller, 2015, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction (https://brevitymag.com/craft-essays/the-shared-space) is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. copyright law.
To Do or Not To Do: On the Comfort of List Essays,” by Jill Kolongowski, 2021, Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction (https://brevity.wordpress.com/2021/11/05/of-list-essays/) is used under a Fair Use exemption to U.S. copyright law.
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