Archive for June 21st, 2009
How to combine thought and story in an essay
Why write a personal essay? One reason is that few other forms allow a writer to combine story and idea, action and thought; in short, to not only relate incidents from your life, but to muse about the implications.
The question is, how to do this so that it works? You might think that an easy answer would be to write a story, than divide it into scenes; then, in between the cracks of the scenes, insert your musings. Asterisks or white space or some other visual device can be used to signal the transitions. This is certainly what I thought, in making my own first attempts at thoughtful essays.
I quickly discovered that my first-draft readers found such conglomerations hard to read. They didn’t see how the stories connected to the ideas, and worse, they found the story portions aimless and boring: “I couldn’t understand where the story was going or why I was reading it.”
For a long while I didn’t understand why this was. I had labored to select just the right events to make up my scenes, and I had described these events as well as I knew how. My readers constantly told me I was a “good” writer, a clever writer, the essays were “well-written,” and so on. So what was the problem?
