Whole words, whole sight

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?

The other day, sitting in my doctor’s office waiting to get a checkup, the answer came to me. I had written the story in each of these essays as a series of events - but a series of events is not a real story. It may be clearer here if I follow the example of E.M. Foster, and use the word “story” for a sequence of events and “plot” for what I have just called story. From Forster’s wonderful book, Aspects of the Novel:

“The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.

Here is how I would rephrase that in the context of writing a story inside an essay:

The meaning of the events must arise out of the events themselves, not out of any external commentary.

It is all right to have external commentary (that is, musings) that build on that meaning, that make additional connections and extensions - but the essential meaning must lie in the story and not outside of it. The events must constitute what in theater we would call a dramatic action, or more simply, an action. An action implies motive, meaning, force, desire, etc. - all the things that bring readers to care about what happens next.

It is interesting to realize this, and then to examine certain essays that seem to combine “ideas and story.” In doing so we may find that quite often, nearly the entire essay is story - that is, the action extends much farther than we had thought, so that what is “idea” is only a tiny part of the text.

A good example is the much-anthologized “Death of a Moth,” by Annie Dillard. Read it casually and you might think, “Okay, Dillard uses a burning moth as a metaphor for how she wants to live her life as a writer.” This would imply a clear split: story > watching the moth burn, idea > this same intensity is how we should live as writers. But if you look for the action in the essay, it is more than that. What we initially might have thought of as the “idea” portion of the essay is written not as “musing” but as scene: the narrator talking to her students, the immediacy of the event made visceral by such phrases as:

I don’t think this essay would work nearly as well if Dillard had written it otherwise - that is, if she had broken off the story after the moth-burning scene and switched to a “musing” portion in which she expressed more or less the same thoughts, but did so directly, without embodying them in an action.

Or to take a different example, look at Wendell Berry’s “An Entrance to the Woods” (you can find it in the collection edited by Phillip Lopate, The Art of the Personal Essay). Here we would seem to have a story (Berry does a solo overnight camping trip in the Red River Gorge, in eastern Kentucky) joined to thoughts (musing about the renewing force of nature vs. the destructive force of humankind). Yet if you examine the essay, you find that the thoughts are not removed from the action; rather, they rise from it, steadily and continually, like mists streaming up from the earth after a hot summer rain. Berry is constantly grounding even the most seemingly abstract of his musings in his physical presence and physical actions:

And even if you look at an essay that at first glance seems pure idea, you may find there is actually an action. Writing In the Dark, by the Israeli novelist David Grossman, seems at first to be constructed as a marvelous series of thoughts, one after the other, about the nature of public and private language. But if you look closely you realize there is a story here: how Grossman, over a period of many years, came to write not just about fictional worlds, but about the pain of his actual life, and what he discovered as a result. The action in the story is Grossman’s, and it is embodied most keenly in the repeated phrase: “I write.”

I don’t claim that dramatic action is the only form that story can or should take in a “story plus idea” essay. I have yet to revisit, for example, John Updike’s long autobiographical essays from the collection Self-Consciousness to see how they are structured. But for starters, I think this might do the trick for short essays of thoughts plus story. Let the meaning arise from the action. Shape the story so there is an action. Then, if you like, add thoughts like mist rising off a hot summer lawn.