3: Bring Form to the Storm

Now that a stunning collection of ideas is swimming through your psyche (and your notebook, and hopefully, your bedroom wall), it’s time to decide how to proceed in terms of form. Creative Nonfiction is the GENRE, but this genre is capable of being molded into several different forms.

A beginning writer may just want to start writing and see how the essay structure evolves as you write it. Avoid getting stuck trying to decide on a form if this is a sticking point for you. As Stephen King advises in his 1986 introduction to The Writer’s Handbook, “When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.”

If you have a little more experience, consider challenging yourself to try a particular form listed below. Above all, be ready to pivot. Let the ideas and words do what they want to do as you filter them onto the page. You may begin with a personal essay in mind and end up with a hilarious top ten list about what not to do on an international flight or a trip to the grocery store with a toddler. The way the work unfolds organically is part of the adventure. As you embark on that first draft, be open to any shape it may take. Alternately, start a few different forms using the same topic, and see which one your hands seem to be unable to stop writing. Here are some potential forms you might consider.

Memoir—The memoir is oriented in the past, whether early childhood or yesterday. It’s different from autobiography in that it focuses on a finite era of the writer’s life or a persistent theme. Lee Gutkind of Creative Nonfiction magazine observes, "The modern memoir is an offshoot of traditional autobiography, but though the two forms share the same umbrella, they claim different ground. The memoir tends to reflect a life organized by theme—drug addiction, for example, or illness—while autobiography is typically a linear catchall, a succession of facts plodding from birth onward."

Thematically, the memoir can carry any focus. The connotation of the word has evolved in American culture so the reader may expect some juicy content, some "tea" in the text. Gutkind agrees: "...narratives about the self, however they are structured, tend to have a scratch to itch, a bone to pick, so the author selects those damning details that stick in the reader’s craw and make the story hard to shake." The origin and actual definition of the word, however, are from the French meaning simply, "memory." A memoir doesn't have to confessional or damning. Writer Dani Shapiro, who has published FIVE books of memoir, all variously themed, says that "Most memoirists' impetus comes from a profound need to understand and be understood. The crafting, the culling of a story is an act of control. You're saying, 'Understand this about me, about my family, my history, my story'" (174).

For many, writing memoir is a way to sort and make sense of life experiences. Sue Monk Kidd, on reflecting why she feels drawn to writing memoir, says, "It's the unexamined experience that seems to wreak the most havoc on my day-to-day world. Writing memoir not only has the ability to reveal me to myself, it also has the power to change me. I suspect writing memoir is partially about the need to bring about wholeness in myself"(115). A writer should not hesitate to produce memoir simply because they have never committed a crime or saved a baby from a burning building or survived being hit by a train. Memoir writing gives us a chance to examine our memories.

Take a look at some notable memoirs as you develop your voice:

• Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick
• I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory by Patricia Hampl
• Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
• My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
• The Color of Water by James McBride
• The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits
• The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
• The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
• The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
• This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff
• Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L’Engle

Here's Gutkind's complete exploration of the history of memoir: https://creativenonfiction.org/writing/the-history-of-memoir/

Personal Essay is tough to define on its own. Some use “personal essay” and “memoir” interchangeably because of the overlap content-wise. Who cares what the difference is, really? Both tell true stories. Memoir tends to imply more intimacy, deeper personal insight, and sometimes a “come what may” approach to sharing the writer’s own truth. Susanne Farrell Smith observes that memoir features the voice of the past self as well as the present, while the personal essay is more in the present. The personal essay, according to Smith, seeks to relate more to the audience instead of just focusing inward. “The writer,” says Smith, “paints herself against the backdrop of humanity.”

The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter what you call your writing. Like the toddler debate about whether it’s raining or sprinkling, maybe memoir and personal essay have enough in common that the Venn diagram is a blob with minimal differential cleavage and isn’t worth getting your heart poked in the debate. Here you go:

You poked my heart! [YouTube video]

Biography: Telling someone else’s story is biography. It’s a tough form to navigate if you see things differently than your subject. You must make a choice as a writer to honor the truth of your subject or to honor your own truth while telling the subject’s story. Read some notable biographies as you consider whether this is the form you want to try:

• Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2010)
• Ron Chernow's Mark Twain (2025), Washington: A Life (2010)--Pulitzer Prize winner; Alexander Hamilton (2005, Inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to write Hamilton the Musical)
• Stacy Schiff's Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) (1999) – Pulitzer Prize winner; Cleopatra: A Life (2010); The Witches: Salem, 1692 (2015)
• Catherine Clinton's Harriet Tubman: The Road to Freedom (2004), Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (2009)

Travel Narrative: Go somewhere. Tell about it in a beautiful way. Be real. Share the ugly as well as the fun. In her introduction to The Best American Travel Writing: 2013, Elizabeth Gilbert made this observation. “Here are two facts I learned long ago about travel writing: 1. There is no story in the world so marvelous that it cannot be told boringly. 2. There is no story in the world so boring that it cannot be told marvelously.” A travel narrative does not need to be about a European backpacking adventure or an African safari. You can tell an epic story about a drive to Pella, Iowa to see the tulips. You can weave a beautiful tale about a hike along a local lakeshore. If you want to take a look at some travel writing, consider the following:

• Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods (1998)
• John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1961)
• Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (2012)
• Jessica Bruder’s Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century (2017)

Food Narrative: Some of our most vivid moments involve food. Think of a favorite or least favorite recipe and weave your tale around the experience of making or eating that food. Some inspiring readings in this form include…

• Maya Angelou’s Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes (2004)
• Lucy Kinsley’s Relish: My Life in the Kitchen (2013)
• Michael Gibney’s Sous Chef: 24 Hours on the Line (2015)

Interview: Interviews are rendered beautifully in The New Yorker magazine’s “Profiles” section. The author is often right there on the page next to the interview subject, reacting and perceiving. This is different than most other interview features in popular media.

Note that if all you do is write your questions and include the subject’s answers, the “creative” part of the essay is reduced to rubble. Describe your subject. How does she turn her head or blink when telling a funny story versus a sad one? What color pillows are on her couch, or what types of photos does she keep on her shelf? Place the reader into the setting, and don’t forget to use all five senses to take us there.

Go into an interview with a handful of questions prepared, but be open to unexpected gems every moment. Some of the best content can materialize from unexpected moments. The best question you can ask when you hear your subject say something interesting is, "Can you tell me more about that?" Be open. Be non-judgemental. Be very, very aware of your nonverbal signals, which will either keep your person talking or shut your person down.

Braided Essay: When a writer takes two or more different threads of thought and weaves them together in a single piece of nonfiction, that essay is braided. Go back to your brainstorming list from Chapter 1 and find two topics that might be tied together in some way. Sometimes they present themselves easily, and sometimes there is a distance that you get to bridge between paragraphs. The best way to see how braiding is done is to (say it with me here)…read some essays.

Here's an excerpt from Issue 22.2 of Fourth Genre Magazine in which the author, Nora Seilheimer, focuses on a single theme of fear, but braids fear of flying with fear of losing her husband to racial violence:

If you travel with a fear of flying, mental health experts recommend that you hold fast to the facts. Remind yourself of statistics that show that the most dangerous part of your travel day is the car ride to or from the airport. Remember that the chances of you being involved in a plane crash are one in three million. Don’t let the media’s recent focus on airline disasters condition you to believe that you’re next. Take a deep breath. Fasten your seatbelt. Clear skies ahead.
If you’re a mixed couple living with a fear of racial violence, Joe and I recommend holding fast to the facts as well, but don’t get your hopes up. While you might interpret someone’s microaggression accurately, or your injustice radar might turn your insides up to a boil, it’s crucial that you stick to The Plan, the one you and your partner devised the second you realized it was too risky to keep loving each other without one. Here’s Our Plan for reference:
Should a situation arise in which Joe is in danger, I will record everything on my phone, following suit of so many, too many Black mothers, sisters, wives, aunties, and friends. I will swipe up from the bottom of my locked screen the way Joe taught me so I don’t lose time entering my six-digit security code. With my phone in hand, I will place my white body in front of Joe’s Black body like a shield. I will let my white tears hit the ground like bombs. Joe will shapeshift. He will get small. He will make his six feet and three inches as close to invisible, impenetrable as possible. Joe won’t say a word. Joe will keep breathing. He will keep breathing. Keep breathing. We won’t let an endless video stream of authority figures murdering Black men condition either of us to believe that Joe is next because he’s not he’s not he is not next . . .

Read more about braided essays here: https://writers.com/braided-essays

Hermit Crab Essay: Hermit crabs wander around encasing themselves in whatever shield is readily available. The same is true for hermit crab essays. Wrap your story about an awkward first date in a private investigator’s surveillance report. Tell about that creepy late-night encounter with a coyote from the perspective of the coyote. Check out the hermit crab essay in the "Voices and Truths" chapter written by Barb L’Heureux about the time she had new windows installed in her home.

Top Ten List: Made popular by David Letterman in the last decades of the twentieth century, a Top Ten List can probably be considered a sub-form under the Hermit Crab Essay. Instead of telling a straight, linear story about the last time you traveled with a toddler, write a top ten list of strategies to survive a long road trip with a toddler. By the end, your story is told in an unexpected form, and you have had some fun.

Good ol’ Essay: We’re not talking about a research paper. We’re talking about those brainstorming lists you made of topics you’re intrigued to learn more about and the deep dive you can take into exploring and presenting your newly gleaned knowledge in an exciting or sinister or humorous way. Here’s a wonderful example of an essay on pirates from Mark Hanna of Humanities Magazine:

Jailbreaks and riots in support of alleged pirates were common throughout the British Empire during the late seventeenth century. Local political leaders openly protected men who committed acts of piracy against powers that were nominally allied or at peace with England. In large part, these leaders were protecting their own hides: Colonists wanted to prevent depositions proving that they had harbored pirates or purchased their goods. Some of the instigators were fathers-in-law of pirates.

The best essays take something known and dig deeper in order to present the bigger picture, such as this piece written by William Ferris on the cultural origins of singer Johnny Cash:

Five hundred white families were given farms of 20 to 40 acres that included a house, barn, privy, a mule, a cow, chicken coop, and food and supplies to support the family until they harvested their first crop. Each family cleared the land and cultivated their crops on it. In the winter of 1935, Ray and Carrie Rivers Cash moved into one of the homes with their children, one of whom was three-year-old Johnny Cash.

Essays that focus externally come with a similar set of ethics. The phrase “Research Paper” thumps our spirits with some trepidation, but it’s crucial to remember the rules of good research when writing an essay. I feel better about it when I reframe research and tell myself that I’m INVESTIGATING. A little shift to a CSI vibe changes my approach, but my responsibility to share truth remains. Find reliable sources and explain to your audience exactly why you trust them. Standard source citation may or may not be required by your instructor or audience, but you should still be crystal-clear with your audience about where you got your information. In this case, “creative” applies to the memorable way you present the new knowledge and the dominant impression you choose to convey.

How to choose your form? Just start writing. Get the story or information onto the page in rough draft or list form, and then decide how to shape it. Start with a basic essay form. As you continue to write, have some fun and try new forms. Consider what Truman Capote said in 1957 about the form an essay should take:

Since each story presents its own technical problems, obviously one can't generalize about them on a two-times-two-equals-four basis. Finding the right form for your story is simply to realize the most natural way of telling the story. The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right (qtd in Hill).