The Things Themselves, Alive With Metaphor

Essay in 12 Steps | ONE | "...the lyric essay—with its malleability, ingenuity, immediacy, complexity, and use of poetic language—give[s] us a fresh way to make music of the world." ~Deborah Tall

I’ll admit that in addition to feeling genuinely excited about this Essay Challenge, I am also nervous. The work I’ll be asking you to do this week is essential to the lyric form and will get us off on the right foot—but it’s also challenging. When I teach this skill in person, most people stumble for a while (and sometimes a long while). So, on the precipice of this steep challenge, I received a simple note from a new subscriber that moved me quite deeply (and to all of you who’ve written notes recently, thank you!!):

I have always enjoyed writing, but never considered myself any good at it. I've enjoyed your weekly prompts and feel like I would like to delve into this creative expression more fully. Thank you for what you do and sharing your gift.

This note is exactly the reason, the purpose, the engine behind this newsletter. And it also emboldens me to say to you, whoever you are—whether you are new to writing and, therefore, a bit scared, or you have been writing for a long, long time and are therefore a little burnt out and afraid to leave your comfort zone—that this challenge is especially for you, to honor your human birthright to the pleasure of words, to celebrate language, to revel in ideas, and to kindle the fire of your own creativity. You have a right to creative expression, and a responsibility, too. Perhaps this is one of the most urgent callings of our time: the call to “do language,” as Toni Morrison puts it:

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

And if we wish to do language “on purpose,” we need to approach words with a beginner’s mind and a child’s sense of playful joy. In this way, we might find our way back to something less stale and more dynamic and feral in this language we claim to love, something slightly less controlled, and, therefore, more ecstatic, brutal, and ultimately true.

That’s the hope for this Essay Challenge—for the process, at least.

When it comes to the product, which is the essay itself, well, that comes with no guarantee. This is art, and uncertainty is the governing principle of art. Besides, when it comes to the lyric essay,  we have, as you might imagine, no template (though I’ll be providing plenty of resources for further reading, including at the end of this post).

But as for the “steps,” I am constructing those wholly from my own experience and intuition, informed by my many years of writing essays, including nearly a decade now writing mainly lyric essays, some of which I believe are beautiful and a few that have won minor prizes. I think the most thrilling of those minor recognitions might have been when Jo Ann Beard selected my essay “The Part That Burns” as first runner up in the Crazy Horse contest. Sometimes it’s not the prize, but the validation from a literary hero that means the most. Anyway, it feels strange indeed that I have been writing essays for publication for more than 30 years, which makes me feel older than my age of 55, but I first started having my work published in my early twenties, which is on the young side.

Anyway. I’m a little nervous, because I want you to like this Essay Challenge. I want you to feel like you’re accomplishing something, learning something, and inching closer to the writer you want to be—and maybe even the person you want to be. Because in Writing in the Dark, the word “writer” is often interchangeable with the word “person,” and the word “writing” is often interchangeable with the word “living.” And we’ll harness the creative tension of that particular overlap during the next 12 weeks, starting today.

In that creative tension lies the path to a slightly more awake way of being in the world, and a slightly better chance of capturing some sliver of that awakeness in prose. And that’s where we’ll begin: with our awareness and with an active pledge to get as close up to the world as we can with our words.

Also: we’re going to let go of our certainties for the duration of the Essay Challenge. May Maria Popova’s words guide us in this:

Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life.

These mutual pledges to attention and uncertainty will serve us well as we explore the lyric essay. Which, as you may know, is rather difficult to define. Essays, broadly speaking, are nonfiction or hybrid prose, usually focused on a specific topic, and with a word count somewhere between 1500 and 4000 (that’s based on publishing norms; the essay itself can be much, much longer, but publishing opportunities for essays longer than 5000 words are much less common—so while I won’t give you a final word limit during this challenge, it is useful to know the norms if you wish to publish).

The lyric essay is a subset of personal essay, and there is no easy-to-follow formula to craft one. The lyric essay is particularly slippery because it is, by its nature, more experimental than not. The lyric essay defies traditional narrative structure and pushes against the boundaries of both prose and poetry, resulting in something emotive, and evocative, and crackling with life. Let’s take a close up look at what makes lyric essays what they are, including what others have said about them, and in that way start envisioning how we can spiral our way into one.