Tension and Shape: How Incongruous Things Press Against Each Other to Make Meaning

Essay in 12 Steps | FOUR | "Rest your finger there for a moment. Feel the bone your blade will follow. Make a wish, if you must, and then slice from collar to belly carefully." ~Chelsea Biondolillo

Week four of the essay challenge and we find ourselves on the threshold of topic and shape. A rather momentous shift, after three weeks spent in an almost dizzying level of uncertainty and possibility. Before we move forward, two quick announcements:

Writing in the Dark (Live Workshop)

On Monday, August 28 we’ll open registration for the next live, synchronous (virtual on Zoom) session of “Writing in the Dark,” themed: “The Feeling of What Happens: Advanced Techniques for Writing That Stirs Emotion.” I’m adapting this session from the curriculum I’m creating for my in-person class at Stillwater Prison this fall. I did something like this once before, when I taught animal writing (by recorded correspondence) at Shakopee Women’s Prison while teaching the same curriculum on Zoom to outside students. I found it powerful to explore the craft this way, both inside and outside simultaneously. I deepened my practice and my humanity. If you haven’t joined the waitlist for the Writing in the Dark workshop yet, you still can do so here (joining the waitlist does not guarantee a spot in Writing in the Dark, but it does ensure you will get a direct email notice on Monday when registration opens).

Fall Courses At Elephant Rock

We have a beautiful array of fall courses taught by talented writers who are also devoted teaching artists. Wendy Brown-Báez, an award winning writer, teacher, performance poet, and installation artist, is offering a gorgeous class called “Re-Wilding Our Writing, Re-wilding Ourselves” (which has never felt more urgent). The beloved Jill Swenson of Swenson Book Development brings us “The Art of Time in Memoir” (a perennial challenge that Jill addresses so skillfully). Denise Robbins, co-author of Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century is offering “Generative Climate Fiction” (we’re thrilled to offer this outstanding course). Plus “Metaphors of Our Lives” (taught by an Elephant Rock favorite, Arya Samuelson) and more. These courses are richly layered experiences structured to nurture the writer and challenge the writing.

Find detailed descriptions and registration info here!

Back to the essay challenge. I’ve been treasuring your feedback on this unusual process, and I’ve been trying to keep up with all of the comments and arresting work samples, which has been a joy for me. If I miss any, please know that it is not intentional. I keep combing through trying to catch everything, but sometimes it takes a while and I may not be able to respond personally to all comments despite my best efforts. That said, the comments on these posts are an absolute masterclass on the craft, so if you’re not reading the comments, you really should.

Meanwhile, I’m also grateful for your tolerance for this elongated period of disciplined attention combined with playful exploration all leading to … we don’t know what, do we?

So delicious, maddening, and necessary.

And I promise we’ll soon get to the nuts and bolts of this week’s work toward homing in on essay topic and shape, but stay with me for a moment on the issue of uncertainty. Why? Because even as we move forward toward shape and aboutness, uncertainty will remain our guiding principle. Only with uncertainty can the work remain alive and unruly. As Dinty Moore, editor of Brevity, said last week, “A writer who hopes to create something fresh and lasting sits down with questions, sees where they lead her, discovers new questions, and follows them into unexpected territory.”

A lyric essay is not a paint-by-number affair. We (and by we, I mean each and every one of us individually) are thrashing our way through the thicket of the unknown, reaching after something—not the known, per se, but the glint of recognition. The flash. The agate of maybe.

David Bayles and Ted Orland in their book Art and Fear, write:

Control, apparently, is not the answer. People who need certainty in their lives are less likely to make art that is risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive, or spontaneous. What's really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking for, some strategy for how to find it, and an overriding willingness to embrace mistakes and surprises along the way. Simply put, making art is chancy—it doesn't mix well with predictability. Uncertainty is the essential, inevitable and all-pervasive companion to your desire to make art. And tolerance for uncertainty is the prerequisite to succeeding.

After a passage detailing the chronic, permanent and often painful gap between our vision and what we are able to execute (a gap that Ira Glass speaks beautifully about), Bayles and Orland go on to say:

"In making art you need to give yourself some room to respond authentically, both to your subject matter and to your materials. Art happens between you and something -- a subject, an idea, a technique -- and both you and that something need to be free to move. Many fiction writers, for instance, discover early on that making detailed plot outlines can be an exercise in futility; as actual writing progresses, characters increasingly take on a life of their own, sometimes to the point that the writer is as surprised as the eventual reader by what their creations say and do. Laurence Durrell likened the process to driving construction stakes in the ground: you plant a stake, run fifty yards ahead and plant another, and pretty soon you know which way the road will run. E.M. Forster recalled that when he began writing A Passage to India he knew that the Malabar Caves would play a central role in the novel, that something important would surely happen there—it's just that he wasn't sure what it would be.”

So, uncertainty is the prerequisite for possibility, discovery, illumination. Stating what we already know is … well, at best, it’s unidimensional, and at worst, it’s boring and inaccurate (isn’t there always more to any aspect of life than the part we first see or assume we understand?).

With this reminder in hand, we leap now toward topic and shape. In other words, our essays are about to begin the process of becoming “things themselves.”

Every story has a shape, or a narrative structure—a frame, or a skeleton. The story’s bones and cartilage give strength and integrity to the material—the muscle and fat and soft tissue of language—that writers use to create work that lives and breathes.

We all know the classic narrative structure of beginning, middle, end—but what lies beyond this simple, familiar, and comfortingly chronological shape? What other shapes can provide necessary structure for our stories? Can push and pull against the flesh of our narratives to provide tension, white space, and organic metaphor toward meaning versus the standard beginning, middle, end route? And where can we find those other shapes?

In her craft book on narrative structure, Meander, Spiral, Explode, author Jane Alison aptly notes:

For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel—one we're actually told to follow—and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides… But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?

Why not, indeed. A whole world of creative freedom lies just outside the swell of a traditional narrative arc. Creating nonlinear forward momentum through natural patterns—like waves, spirals, radials, and fractals—opens room for more intuitive and inventive storytelling.

A story’s form is built on both the micro and macro level. Sarah Appleton Pine does a beautiful job summarizing Jane Allison and Ander Monson’s explanations of the micro-level form creation on the Ploughshares blog:

Alison also suggests examining “elementary particles, the visual, auditory, and temporal units with which we first design.” She describes these units as “the tribe of punctuation—and the spaces between marks” as well as “types of letters, lengths of words, friction or fluidity among them, repetition, pauses or liltings within our inner ear signaled by commas or question marks.” Form begins with the most essential parts of writing. [Ander] Monson similarly urges attention to detail at the sentence level. “I want it to be art, meaning that I want it transformed, juxtaposed, collaged—worked on like metal sculpture, each sentence hammered, gleaming, honed,” he explains. “For me, the sentence is where it’s at—the way the story’s told—not simply the story behind the language.” Monson asserts that to be art, a story requires well-crafted sentences. Alison adds that “[s]uper-short paragraphs,” which she calls crots (prose stanzas), “and line breaks can aerate prose, throwing light into density, giving the reader space to think. They also create dynamism, letting the eye swing to the left more often, each swing shifting the thought.” In other words, a story is so much more than the words that it comprises, and form is more elemental than the overarching structure.

Only after writers consider these particles can they go on to consider how form might interact with the story they want to tell.

This is precisely why we have spent so much time so far on the word and sentence level with shimmers and shards, with questions, with answers, and, finally, with question/answer pairings and iterative shufflings of those pairings. This is why we have remembered how important it is to train our eyes and ears. To practice paying attention. Like molding a sculpture from clay, we are wise to see if we might allow our story’s shape to emerge from something already true. This feels different than forcing a story to occupy a particular shape.

As we begin this precarious dance of topic and shape, I want to remind you to unlock your knees, drop your shoulders, become light on your feet. We must stay loose and fluid and open to whatever might arise during this phase. We must stay playful, even if our way of playing is shy and reticent.

Before we turn our attention to your stories, your piles of shimmers and shards, questions and answers—these things you will breathe life into over the remaining eight weeks—let us dwell in something unique and beautiful and already alive, an essay in the shape of a braid by Chelsea Biondolillo, “How to Skin a Bird”:

Your first and only incision will be right over the sternum. All birds have a bald patch there. Blow lightly on the breast until the feathers begin to part and you can see the pale skin beneath.

Rest your finger there for a moment. Feel the bone your blade will follow. Make a wish, if you must, and then slice from collar to belly carefully.

*

I used to keep the letters my father had written to me in a box with all of my other letters. There were three of them, all written before I was eight, on lined paper with a ripped, spiral fringe. He put them into the envelopes he sent my mother. Otherwise, they were empty, except for a check, always made out for $75. Sometimes the envelopes came from Alaska or Tahiti.

When I was a little older, if I saw the mail before my mother, I would feel the envelopes, to see if they were thicker than just-a-check.

You will need to cut the spinal column and trachea before you go any further. To do this, carefully work a small surgical probe between the skin and neck muscles at the very top of your cut. The curved tip is blunt, and if you advance it slowly, it shouldn’t tear the skin. Work it behind the neck until you can see it on the other side. Then slide the lower blade of a scissor along the steel. When you can see the scissor’s point, cut.

On larger birds, you may need to cut two or three times, blindly. This is why the probe is important: it keeps you from cutting through the back of the neck and beheading your specimen.

You will want to read the full essay (it isn’t long—but you can save that until you finish reading this post if you like). And you will want to read the essay like a writer, which is to say, once through just for the feeling of it. Then, again, noticing the micro level work: the shape and feel of the words. The “elementary particles.” Then read for the shape of the story itself—the separate narrative strands, one being Biondolillo’s relationship with her father, the other being instructions on how to skin a bird. Notice how these two strands create a third more powerful cord of white space crackling with meaning in the space between.

In an interview in response to a question on how the form of her essay changed or not, Biondolillo, who is also a collage artists, replied:

Originally, the way I envisioned “How to Skin a Bird” was that there would be a section of taxidermy, an asterisk, a section of my relationship with my father, and then a large amount of white space, and then another couplet, because I saw two elements spinning around this point and people didn't get that. Now it is: A piece of taxidermy, a piece of relationship, an asterisk, then another set, and a little bit of white space between. Conceptually, as far as the elements go, it brought the two disparate braids in closer relationship and it created an essay where there is, rather than these diptychs floating around in space, paired ideas that almost come like vignettes one after the other and it feels more chronological to readers. So it totally changed. I think it's stronger than my original idea.

To begin the work of building our essays, we will focus on this particular organic shape, the braid. Later I’ll also introduce the braid’s close cousin, the collage (the literary equivalent of the visual art form, so, in that sense, exactly what it sounds like). I’m focusing on these shapes because they are familiar enough to play with and learn from. Also, braiding and collaging are both very well suited to the lyric essay. Finally, these are shapes I myself have written often enough to teach confidently on Substack! (Here we are, all of us, co-creating in this incredible way. It’s so magical.)

As we look at the braid, we will grow familiar with its various considerations: the balance of space between the strands (topical space, I mean, as in, the level of similarity or dissimilarity between the two strands), closeness of the weave, and length and position of each strand, to name only a few. Such considerations will inform the final form of your essay, even if you stumble into them organically versus intentionally (and both strategies are valid!).

To note, as Jane Alison describes, nature offers infinite patterns you can look to for inspiration on nonlinear narrative form. While it would be impossible for me to teach these infinite patterns in the span of twelve weeks, you might, as you widen your field of vision for shapes, find others beyond the braid or collage that call to you and your essay. If that happens, and you want to settle on an alternate shape, please feel free to discuss your choice (including questions or challenges) in the comments and I will gladly offer whatever guidance I can along the way.

Part of what makes the braid irresistibly compelling to memoirists and CNF writers is the shift of meaning that occurs when you place two seemingly unrelated things next to each other. Such “juxtaposition of incongruities” is how comedians make their jokes funny. As writers, we need it to make our work add up to more than the sum of its parts. Nicole Walker describes this in her essay “The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action,” in Creative Nonfiction:

What is creative nonfiction writing but the shaping and reshaping of self against fact? You take a personal story and give it syntax, grammar, language, punctuation. The simple fact of putting it on paper reshapes it. But now you’ve got to give it context, associate meaning to it. So next to that personal story, you set a paragraph about apples, or condoms, or chickens, or gun violence. Suddenly, your personal story is reshaped by these new facts, and the facts of your personal story cut into the hard statistics of your paragraph about imported apples or the failure rate of condoms.

We can see this shaping and reshaping at work in Biondolillo’s essay. The “objective” strand about skinning birds sheds new light, casts new meaning on her “subjective” story about her relationship with her father. This juxtaposition of two things that are not directly related or ostensibly alike creates tension and metaphor.

Walker describes this phenomenon this way:

A problem for both memoir and nature writing is that some authors assume that nature and hardship inherently signify meaning: an addiction overcome must be meaningful; a bird, flying, must be meaningful.

I do think, depending on how you write it, that birds and addictions can make meaning, but I think meaning often lies in what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “first-rate intelligence”: the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at the same time. The tension between two unlike things working against each other does, with enough stress and repetition, press out meaning.

This method of “pressing out of meaning” is exactly what we are attempting as we work this week’s multistep prompt for the Essay in 12 Steps Challenge. Let’s see how we do!