Clifford Thompson | November 2021

Over the years of reading works of personal creative nonfiction, and of evaluating students’ creative nonfiction writing, I have developed ideas about what is necessary for successful works in this genre. I do not feel that supplying these elements necessarily guarantees a satisfying reading experience—if only the matter were that simple. I have come to observe, rather, that when I feel ultimately unsatisfied with a work in this genre, however much I may like and admire about it, perhaps seven times out of ten it is because one or more of these elements are missing.

Most student writing I read is to one extent or another personal narrative, and so I will begin by discussing that large subset of creative nonfiction. It is my feeling that a good work of personal narrative tells readers, however indirectly, three things: what happened; what changed; and what it means. In saying this, I may risk being obvious, on the one hand, or being tyrannical or hopelessly old-fashioned on the other, or possibly all three; but I share these thoughts because in much of what I read, I do not have a sense of what the events described mean to the writer.

Personal narrative is art. Innumerable, unrelated details make up life; however, once those details are together on the page, they take on relationships to one another, and managing those relationships, conveying a sense of what the details add up to together, is the art of the creative nonfiction writer. Life itself may be meaningless; the representation of life on the page must have meaning.

So, for example: a piece of writing about an all-night poker game will fall flat—no matter how entertainingly the writer recalls what was said, no matter how inventively the writer describes the card players’ facial expressions—if nothing of significance changes by the end of the narrative. Perhaps at the end of the piece, one card player suddenly pulls out a pistol and shoots one of the others to death. This may take the reader’s breath away—and yet even this dramatic turn will not make the piece into a compelling narrative if it is not foreshadowed, if it is not connected to anything else that has been described, and, most importantly, if the writer’s interpretation of events does not lead the reader, however subtly, to the event’s larger meaning.

The danger of using the set of criteria for creative nonfiction writing that I have laid out—what happened, what changed, and what it means—is that it may seem to reduce to a formula what ought to be a form whose only forbidden territory is the misrepresentation of facts. But I would argue that the inclusion of these three elements does not in itself compromise artistic freedom. A writer of creative nonfiction is free to scramble chronology to his or her or their heart’s content; the writer is free to opine, speculate, even invent—so long as the reader understands what the writer is doing, and when. So, it is not my intention or desire to impose strict rules that inhibit the creativity of the nonfiction writer; personal narrative and other forms of creative nonfiction constitute art, and too many rules spell the death of art. Neither is it my aim, in stressing the importance of what it means, to tell writers that they must put what is often called a “bow” on the ends of their essays and memoirs, one that ties everything up so completely and neatly that there is nothing left for readers to think about. It is my aim to say that in all but the most unusual cases—and a bit later I will go into one of those—the three elements I am describing need to be present, even if readers must do some head-scratching to discover what and where they are.

It may be helpful to look at a few examples of the way master nonfiction writers have handled the job of conveying in their works what happened, what changed, and what it means.

The best way to summarize the events described in James Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son,” the title piece of his first essay collection (1955), is to quote the essay’s short, elegant, deceptively simple first paragraph in its entirety:

On the 29th of July, in 1943, my father died. On the same day, a few hours later, his last child was born. Over a month before this, while all our energies were concentrated in waiting for these events, there had been, in Detroit, one of the bloodiest race riots of the century. A few hours after my father’s funeral, while he lay in state in the undertaker’s chapel, a race riot broke out in Harlem. On the morning of the 3rd of August, we drove my father to the graveyard through a wilderness of smashed plate glass.

Many aspects of “what happened” are included in that opening paragraph. Another, however, unfolds through the essay. Baldwin’s father has long had an absolute, terrified distrust of white people, one that not only encompasses whites as a whole but extends to any individual white person, known or unknown. For his part, Baldwin writes, “I did not feel this way and I was certain, in my innocence, that I never would.” Baldwin begins to understand his father’s point of view when he goes to work in defense plants in New Jersey during World War II, and has his first real experiences with racism, which lead him one evening to a breaking point. And so, we see part of what happened: the young Baldwin comes to understand, if not share completely, the bitterness that has consumed the life of his father, this figure towards whom he felt such ambivalence, and with whom he found it so difficult to communicate.

After his father’s funeral, a partially misreported event involving race leads blacks in Harlem to riot. They vent their wrath over oppression in a way that is at once necessary—or at least inevitable—and wasteful and destructive. Seeing the damage done in Harlem, Baldwin comes to understand the fruits of the bitterness that the father knew and that has now been passed to the son, and to understand that one of the things one’s bitterness can destroy is oneself. What changes here is that Baldwin comes to think of his father and his own life in a new way. The stage is set, then, for what it means.

It is possible to wonder if Baldwin might have ended his essay in a less explicit way, without what some refer to as a bow. There is no question that he has earned the ending he writes, and yet might he have found a way for readers to reach his conclusions on their own, without reading the actual words on the page? I will quote the essay’s last paragraph, too, in its entirety:

It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength. This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair. This intimation made my heart heavy and, now that my father was irrecoverable, I wished that he had been beside me so that I could have searched his face for the answers which only the future would give me now.

One might ask whether this ending to Baldwin’s essay is as effective as it might have been. But perhaps there is no point in asking, since the ending is plenty effective as it is: powerful and explicit, its power deriving in large part from its explicitness. And for all its directness, the ending also manages a couple of subtle things. One is to refer to his father’s face, which Baldwin has described early on, thereby giving the reader an image to hang onto. The other is to refer, in the very last sentence, to the future. The advantage of endings and expressions of meaning that are not explicit is that the reader can ponder them, and so they live on in the reader’s mind. But Baldwin, for all his explicitness, achieves this effect by pointing toward a time he cannot know but which we can contemplate long after we have finished reading.

Another essay that conveys the three elements I focus on on—what happened, what changed, and what it means—in a subtle, artful, beautiful way that lingers in the reader’s mind is “Aces and Eights,” the last piece in Annie Dillard's 1982 collection Teaching a Stone to Talk. The narrator of the essay, which is written in present tense, is the thirty-five-year-old Dillard, who tells us of spending one July weekend in a rural cottage in the company of a nine-year-old who would seem to be Dillard’s daughter but whom the narrator calls simply “the child.” The narrator and the child are both nearly obsessed with preserving their memories of the moments they enjoy, to the point of not really being able to enjoy those moments, at least as they are happening. For, although the narrator does not put it exactly this way, to fail to remember a moment is to lose it; to preserve it, on the other hand, is to counter the passage of time, to resist the steady movement toward death. Over the course of the weekend, the narrator and the child play cards and talk, the child rides her bike, and the two host an elderly neighbor for dinner. The neighbor, Noah Very, is described as being generally cranky but appears to take a liking to the child. The child, for her part, is not particularly interested in Noah but listens to his stories, while kneeling on the couch and looking toward the window, until one of the stories—which alludes to when the girl is “all grown up”—sends her into a reverie:

[The child] is listening. She hears the hard part, about being all grown up, and married, and having four children…. And as he speaks, her eyes slide out of focus, leave the room, and fill with the blank, impossible figures of these strangers. There is a strange, unthinkable female in a yellow dress, and a tall, blank husband beside her. There are these four children of hers. And she thinks, I swear she thinks, I can see her eyes widen as she thinks, seeing these blurred children all in a row: The oldest would be older than I am!

I laugh. The child’s eyes snap into focus, and abruptly, delighted, meet my gaze in the window. The woman, husband, and four children vanish. The child sees this: inside the near, shadowed outline of her own reflection in the window, a smaller, distant reflection under a lamp—just me, a woman in her thirties, drinking sherry and smoking a cigarette.

The child is holding my eye, which she sees inside the lighted scene inside the breast of her dress. She is laughing because I laughed and she knows why…. The child turns herself around on the couch, and together we resume listening to Noah.

So, in “Aces and Eights,” we see what happens and what changes. What happens is that the narrator and child, whose shared tendency is to focus on any time but the time they are in—often by trying to preserve the present moment for the sake of the future—these two characters have a dinner guest who tells stories. What changes is that during the course of the gathering, narrator and child share an experience that results in their being pulled back into the moment they are in, and they discover the joy and wisdom of being there. And once again, the stage is set for what it means, which, in my reading, Dillard subtly, deftly conveys in the essay’s final paragraph. It is Sunday morning in July, and the narrator and child prepare to leave the cottage:

And leaving—let me add by way of epilogue—we find ourselves on the receiving end of a tiny, final event, a piece of unexpected wind.

A ripple of wind comes down from the woods and across the clearing toward us… as if some reckless, impatient wind has bumped the north door open on its hinges and let out this acre of scent familiar and forgotten, this cool scent of tundra, and of November. Fall!… It is an entirely misplaced air—fall, that I have utterly forgotten, that could be here again, another fall, and here it is only July. I thought I was younger, and would have more time. The gust crosses the river and blackens the water where it passes, like a finger closing slats.

Autumn is a familiar enough symbol of the later stages of one’s life, as is the wind that serves as its harbinger. But Dillard, in the very last sentence, does something new and interesting with this wind. “The gust crosses the river and blackens the water where it passes,” she writes, referring only to elements of the natural world: the gust, the river, the blackened water. Then, with her last phrase, she adds a human element: “like a finger closing slats.” This is presumably a human finger, and the slats it closes are a human invention whose closing signals the end of a day. In this sentence, then, natural and human elements come together to form images that symbolize death—which in my interpretation is Dillard’s way of reminding us that death, including our death, is the natural order of things, that nothing we do will hold it back, that the effort to preserve ourselves through frantically stored memories is doomed to fail, and that the wise course is to enjoy moments as they pass.

Dillard has taken an approach to conveying meaning very different from Baldwin’s, employing subtlety and symbolism in place of sheer explicit power. To my mind Dillard has solved, at least for herself, the puzzle of conveying meaning—of communicating to the reader what happened, what changed, and what it means—without the big bow; she allows us to work out a few things for ourselves and thus allows her work to take up residence in our minds.

Still another very successful nonfiction piece—which I alluded to earlier—is one that could be said to flout the guidelines I have set down here: Jo Ann Beard’s “The Family Hour,” from her 1998 collection The Boys of My Youth. Beard writes about her family life in the late 1960s, when she was a schoolgirl. The young Jo Ann has a sister, Linda, who is older but close to her in age, and their little brother, Brad, is four years old. Like many, if not most, sisters close in age, Jo Ann and Linda fight constantly; they both regard Brad as a kind of alien, a “strange little guy,” as Beard calls him, who is constantly covered in dirt and has an imaginary friend named Charcoal. Their mother is loving but no-nonsense, with a harried sardonic air from the demands of raising three children and from dealing with her husband, an affable dad who is also, as the essay gradually reveals, an alcoholic.

The tragedy of this family, perhaps not uncommon in the 1960s, is that—with the possible exception of the father—they do not understand the nature of addiction. So it is that one Saturday evening, during a period of the father’s sobriety, when he and the mother come home from a gathering of friends at a local tavern, the mother complains to the young Jo Ann in the kitchen that the father “embarrassed” her “to death” at the tavern by being “holier than thou” and drinking orange juice while everyone else was having cocktails—as if he could shut off his need for alcohol after one or two drinks. Returning to the living room, where her father and sister are watching television, Jo Ann—most likely just wanting her parents to get along—asks her father if she can get him a beer from the refrigerator. Beard perfectly captures the silent horror that greets this question, which her father answers only with a shake of his head. Soon he is in the kitchen getting the beer himself, and his sober streak comes to an end.

The climax of the story is the evening when the father drunkenly wrecks the family car, badly injuring himself, and then walks home in the cold and enters the house covered in blood. What is wonderful, amid this ghastly scene, is the way the family comes together, rising above their usual squabbles. The sisters help to get their father cleaned up, alternately hugging each other and telling their dad that they love him. When the mother and an aunt take the father to the hospital, the children are left alone. Linda cleans up while Jo Ann tends to their little brother, Brad, who has been traumatized by the sight of the father. She finds him in the bathroom, where he has thrown up. “I can’t find Charcoal!” he tells Jo Ann, referring to his imaginary friend. “He saw Dad and runned away!”

At this moment the reader sees Jo Ann become, if only temporarily, an adult. She leaves the bathroom, closing the door and pretending to search for Charcoal. After counting to fifty, she reappears in the bathroom. Beard ends the piece this way:

“I found good old Charcoal,” I say.

Brad looks up at me from his spot on the floor. He’s been rubbing the washcloth across his brow and his hair is standing up in front. He stares at the air next to my shoulder for a moment, searching. Suddenly relief floods across his face.

“Hi,” he says.

I don’t know of a more touching end to a personal essay. What I also don’t know is why I find this piece so satisfying, in spite of the fact that it does not reveal anything to me, as I feel the best essays generally do. I have some theories about it, though. We see what has happened: the father’s alcoholism has led to a terrible accident. And we see what has changed: the young Jo Ann rises above her schoolgirl self-involvement and meets the challenge of acting like an adult. To ask, in this instance, “But what does it mean?” is to sound like someone so rule-bound that he cannot appreciate beauty when he sees it. So let me say that I do appreciate the beauty of this work and am, for that reason, interested in knowing how it works and why it works.

Up until now, I have discussed creative nonfiction in monolithic terms. Perhaps a clue to the success of “The Family Hour,” despite its not having a meaning in the way that “Notes of a Native Son” or “Aces and Eights” do, can be found in a discussion of what separates essay from memoir. Judith Kitchen writes in “Grounding the Lyric Essay,” “The moment of the memoir is the past; the moment of the personal essay is the present.” According to that description, “The Family Hour” is memoir rather than essay, the “moment” being the past, the job of interpretation left in the hands of the reader as much as in the hands of the author. Perhaps, in this instance, sheer emotional resonance stands in quite successfully for a revelation of “what it means.”

And then there are nonfiction pieces that are not quite either memoir or personal essays, that have personal elements, but are more accurately described as thought pieces. They are sometimes called expository essays rather than persuasive essays or op-eds, the difference being that they seek to discover truth, even if they ultimately do not, even more than they try to convey truth; that their aim is not to represent one side of an argument but to illuminate every side in the hope of landing, possibly with reservations, on the one that makes the most sense. A quintessential example of such an essay is the title piece of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 collection Consider the Lobster.

Such essays, it seems to me, exhibit a three-part structure that parallels but is different from the what happened/what changed/what it means model. For such essays I would substitute another model: context, observation, and conclusion. The context of “Consider the Lobster” is the longtime practice of boiling lobsters alive before eating them, an activity taking place on a massive scale at the Maine Lobster Festival, which Wallace was sent to cover by Gourmet magazine in 2003. Wallace’s observations involve the anatomy and scientific classification of lobsters, the history of eating lobsters, the journey of these crustaceans from “low-class food” to culinary delicacy, the various theories and arguments with which people justify boiling sentient creatures for their gastronomic pleasure, and the reasons these justifications (which include the notion that lobsters do not experience pain) are suspect at best. Wallace’s conclusion is nothing as simple as a condemnation of the practice of boiling and eating lobsters or of eating animals generally, since, as he writes, “I like to eat certain kinds of animals and want to be able to keep doing it, and… I have not succeeded in working out any sort of personal ethical system in which the belief is truly defensible instead of just selfishly convenient.” His conclusion, rather, is about the importance of considering the question of morality involved in practices such as boiling lobsters.

While “Consider the Lobster” is an example of the three-part structure I have described—context, observation, conclusion—it also demonstrates that this structure need not be inhibiting or restrictive. In the case of “Consider the Lobster,” at least one other structure exists within it, or alongside it. The essay very cleverly reflects its subject in that it slowly comes to a boil, turning up the heat, so to speak, with increasingly pointed observations until, about halfway through, the boiling point is reached with this question: “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?”

I have been talking up until now about more-or-less contemporary texts. In order to look—in an admittedly cursory manner—at how my theory applies to older works, I decided to examine an essay by the Englishman William Hazlitt. Keeping in mind my idea—what happened/what changed/what it means, or context/observation/conclusion—I took a fresh look at Hazlitt’s short 1836 work “The Fight.”

This personal narrative tells the story of Hazlitt’s traveling by coach from London’s Chancery Lane to the town of Hungerford to watch a boxing match. The trip is described in great detail, and Hazlitt gives a vivid account of the match between a fighter known as the Gas-man and his victorious opponent, Bill Neate. Since fully half the essay passes before Hazlitt gets to the fight itself, we understand that the fight and its outcome are not the real subjects—at least not the only subjects—of this piece. The attentive reader follows along, wanting as much to discover what Hazlitt will make of all this as to read an account of the match and find out who wins. Hazlitt does not disappoint. It is on the return journey that the writer brings together the two major elements of his story, travel and combat, in a way that sheds light on the whole proceeding—just enough light to see by. He describes his encounter with an elderly fellow traveler who recalls having seen, in his youth, a man named George Stevenson fight the famous bare-knuckle boxer Jack Broughton. The fellow traveler explains that Stevenson also became a coachman, and here the essay’s subjects of travel and fighting are linked; he goes on to say that he later met Stevenson and asked the former fighter if he had ever defeated Broughton. Yes, Stevenson answered, though the fight ended in such a way that everyone thought Broughton had won; and Broughton’s second, on his deathbed, revealed that in fact Broughton had been about to throw in the towel when he was declared the winner, and that Stevenson really had won the fight. Stevenson admitted, however, that Broughton had not been in his prime during their encounter, and that when Broughton was at his best, Stevenson would not have been able to beat him. This account of another fight adds a dimension to our understanding of the one Hazlitt witnessed, and it is here, I maintain, that the deeper meaning of the essay lies. The outcome of the fight Hazlitt had seen would not appear to be in question, and yet, with the description of the other fight, we are led to question whether we ever truly know what has determined the outcome of any fight, or, by extension, any event at all that we have witnessed, let alone those we have not. And so, in Hazlitt’s “The Fight,” we can identify the three elements, including “what it means.”

Up to this point, I have covered more traditional creative nonfiction forms, but I want at least to acknowledge more experimental forms and to address the methods by which they convey meaning. One form that does not necessarily adhere to the three-part structure—neither what happened/what changed/what it means nor context/observation/conclusion—is the lyric essay. The lyric essay seems to defy easy definition, which may be part of its appeal. John D’Agata, who edits a section of The Seneca Review dedicated to lyric essays, edited the 2014 volume We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay and noted in the book’s introduction the way the form “seemed to eschew the story-driven ambitions of fiction and nonfiction for the associative inquiry of poems.” Some maintain that the lyric essay is characterized by a mix of techniques from various genres—poetry, fiction, journalism—while still others see it as a form that proceeds through accumulation rather than theme, narrative, or argument to achieve its effects. What those effects are is up for debate, and if a definition of the lyric essay has proven difficult to pin down, then so have the reasons for its popularity, though that popularity is undeniable.

In terms of the lyric essay’s ability to convey meaning, Kitchen refers to its author’s “quest to discover what’s under the surface, following an impulse wherever it leads, its aim not meaning, but being, and in the fullness of its being, revealing at least something of meaning.” Kitchen is careful to note, “This aspect of wholeness is often what is missing in the essays that claim to be lyric, but aren’t quite. They have flash, but they don’t add up. Or they play around, but to very little end. The ‘essay’ part is missing.” If we accept Kitchen’s premise, with the absence of wholeness in what aspire to be lyric essays, there is absence of meaning. Kitchen writes in another part of her essay, “That’s not to say the writer knows the Meaning—capital M—but that the writer does at least understand that there is a question, something to be discovered in this associative process.” And near the end of “Grounding the Lyric Essay,” Kitchen notes that the lyric essay “generates its meaning by asking its readers to make leaps, to make a kind of narrative sense of the random and the chance encounter. It eschews content for method, and then lets method become its content.”

One method that several critics and I have often observed in lyric essays is repetition. This occurs on different levels: repetition of ideas, or phrases, or words, or sounds in words. In Jenny Boully’s essay “Too Many Spirits Who Begged To Be Let In,” included in We Might As Well Call It the Lyric Essay, the first paragraph—consisting of just over six printed lines—contains three mentions of the phrase “the woman with no teeth”; in the second paragraph, which is seven lines long, there is repetition of the phrases “Some things happen from the inside out,” “intense compression,” and “for instance,” and in one case “for instance” follows closely on “existence.” The effect is that of incantation, forcing us to consider phrases and words apart from their context in sentences, to dwell on their meanings, and on the way such meanings accumulate.

Occasionally I tell my nonfiction students, “It’s okay sometimes to break the rules of grammar. But first you have to know what they are.” I would say the same about the what happened/what changed/what it means or context/observation/conclusion models: that it is possible—as demonstrated by examples of the lyric essay—to craft personal essays and thought pieces so wildly inventive that they toss these old models out the window. But before doing so, I suggest taking the models into account. Because, while it is not clear whether life has meaning or not, creative nonfiction must.

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Clifford Thompson is the author of the novel Signifying Nothing, Love for Sale and Other Essays, Twin of Blackness: A Memoir, and What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues. He is the author and illustrator of the graphic novel Big Man and the Little Men, (forthcoming). Thompson teaches creative nonfiction at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Sarah Lawrence College, and New York University. This essay is adapted from a lecture he gave at Bennington.