Tanya Perkins | February 2022

Volume 54 Number 2, November 2021

Topic

Creative nonfiction, particularly the personal narrative, is often an initial foray into creative writing, since students draw on memories and moments from their lives as a relatively easy starting point. Yet, accurate and vibrant rendering is not all that is needed for a personal narrative to succeed. In this article, Thompson identifies three requisites for a successful work of nonfiction: (1) What happened; (2) What changed; and (3) What it means, asserting that the last item is often the most challenging for students. Although his article focuses on CNF, much of it would be equally applicable to other genres.

I. EDUCATIONAL SETTING

Is the essay appropriate for use in multiple educational settings?

Thompson’s prose is clear and approachable, making the article ideal for an undergraduate workshop or community/continuing education class. Although his focus is CNF, much of the essence of his advice can be applied equally to other genres, since all literature, as Meyer (2007) notes in Poetry: an Introduction, “transforms the facts the world provides—people, places and objects—into experiences that suggest meanings” (p.2). This definition offers a couple of points worth noting. First is that the need for tangible particularities (“people, places, and objects”) is as intrinsic to successful poetry and fiction as it is to CNF. Second is that those particularities must undergo transmogrification through the artful choice and arrangement of words, leading to (drum roll, please) meaning, something readers consciously or unconsciously search for in short stories, novels, lyric poetry, sonnets and more, though “meaning” can go by other names: Emotional resonance (a phrase Thompson uses himself), transference, wisdom, insight, reflection, or so on but regardless, the work needs to point to something beyond itself, with which readers can identify by virtue of their humanity, which also encompasses particular cultural expectations or experiences (more about that later). That meaning is “suggested” is important, as well, for two reasons: (1) The use of the verb points to a suggester, or one doing the suggesting. That’s the writer, our student, who is the focus of Thompson’s attention and ours, too; and (2) There’s no need to clobber the reader over the head with “meaning,” and if the reader needs to do some digging and gathering of their own, so be it.

It’s probably important at this point to acknowledge that Thompson isn’t arguing for rules, as such. One of the joys of art is innovation, which often means shredding so-called rules to create something new, and Thompson addresses this, noting that “too many rules spell the death of art.” Yet the best rule-breaking, the most successful, happens through the artist’s purposefulness—consider conceptual artworks like Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain, which broke every aesthetic and technical rule up to that time but its purposefulness, the ideas it embodied, redefined art throughout the rest of the 20th century (and continues to do so). As artist Sol LeWitt said in 1967 of conceptual art, “[It’s] good only when the idea is good.” The point is—there needs to be a point! The challenge then, is to help our students reflect on what their point is, for themselves on a personal level, and how this sense of purpose might shine through their work.

II. LESSON OBJECTIVE

What do you want them to learn from it?

Thompson identifies three vital ingredients for a successful personal narrative: (1) What happened; (2) What changed; and (3) What it means. Events and significant details have to cohere, have to form some kind of pattern of which a reader can make sense, even if the reader has to do some work (and that’s okay!). But this heuristic may not work for other kinds of creative nonfiction and so, he proposes a parallel tripartite structure: (1) Context; (2) Observation; and (3) Conclusion, more fitting for essays, and aligning to the original French meaning of essai: to try, to attempt, essays which engage in some kind of exploratory inquiry. Still, it is important to note that even with this more exploratory approach, the elements need to cohere in some manner and the ending, even if tentative or unsuccessful at finding answers, might still succeed by offering a better question than the one initiating the inquiry.

The point is to understand that it’s not enough to simply render a series of events, memories or actions via scene or exposition on the page. There must be a sense of “what the events described mean to the writer.” (p. 27) Thompson asserts that personal narrative is art and so “conveying a sense of what the details (rendered on the page) add up to together is the art of the creative nonfiction writer” (p. 27) or, I would add, fiction writer or poet. Other forms, as mentioned above, like the exploratory essay, similarly need some kind of structure leading to discovery or insight; Thompson uses David Foster Wallace’s oft-anthologized “Consider the Lobster” as an example of the second pattern, that of context, observation and conclusion, which roughly corresponds to “what happened, what changed and what it meant.” The student writer has lived through or observed the events about which they write and so has some, often inchoate, sense of what they meant to them but might overlook that the meaning must, in turn, be communicated to the reader through their rendering of the events. Thompson echoes what I have often repeated to my own students: Life is random but the details that comprise your stories/memoir pieces/essays cannot be.

At the same time, meaning isn’t something that can be injected into the story like brine into a turkey. Readers get hooked on people and places and problems, not on abstract concepts. “No ideas but in things,” we tell our students, quoting William Carlos Williams, and so it is within the things, the images, the sensory experiences, that students need to look to tease out what their narrative or essay is really about. “Close observation generates meaning,” according to Heather Sellers, and so this particular element develops as students return to their drafts to notice what they’ve noticed—and notice again.

In fact, one assignment to help students identify and draw out meaning already latent in their drafts is suggested by Thompson’s own analysis of Jenny Boully’s essay, “Too Many Spirits Who Begged to be Let In,” wherein he identifies repetition of particular phrases and moments of consonance. These accumulate to create a pattern of meaning separate from how they are used within their sentences. Students might be asked to review their drafts for repetition of sounds and images, perhaps with a paper copy and highlighters in hand, since to experience a draft in tangible, print form is to see it anew (particularly if students have only been working with it on their computer screens). What repetitions can they highlight—perhaps images in one color and sound repetitions in another? What emerging patterns, no matter how small or fleeting, do they notice? What do they evoke, emotionally, for the student? And how does the accumulation of those images or sounds point to something larger? The benefit of an exercise like this is that it teaches students to plumb the depths of what they’ve already done, to value the generative power of an early draft.

What discussions do you hope this article will generate?

When I invite students in my introductory CW class to share their writing experiences, several will mention the therapeutic benefits of writing, how they’ve worked through tough times by writing poetry and stories or essays. And who am I to challenge the grace of that kind of personal writing? If the meaning is clear to the writer, who feels better for reliving the event, why should they care about taking it any further? What’s wrong with simply wanting to get the story/event/essay/narrative off their chests? These are good questions, leading to discussions about the goals we have as writers, goals that rarely stay static or uniform, and where a reader might fit into them—and who those readers might be. Journaling, trauma-writing, and letters to oneself are valid creative, often cathartic, avenues and yet their goals may be quite different from those set within the framework of a CW class. Heather Sellers (2017) in her wonderful textbook, The Practice of Creative Writing, goes so far as to say that CW isn’t about “expressing your experience but to create an experience in the reader” (p. 5, emphasis added), and so the discussion will inevitably circle back to purpose and audience. Thompson himself makes it clear that he contemplates a particular audience at some distance from the writer, referring to himself as a reader seeking “a satisfying reading experience” (p. 27) and so this is the rhetorical setting within which his advice should be understood.

Yet, the fact is that cultural expectations shape our ideas of audience and so this, too, needs to be part of the discussion. Although speaking of fiction, Matthew Salesses, in Craft in the Real World, cautions against what he calls “normative craft,” the point being that craft is inseparable from cultural expectations and norms. “Language,” he argues, “has meaning because it has meaning for someone. Meaning and audience do not exist without one another” (p. 32). Consideration of their own implied reader will encourage students to revise their work in a way that conveys what events meant to them—and that will resonate with their identified reader, especially if that reader is outside of the white, straight, cis-gendered audience to which we so often default. In fact, even just drawing attention to that default can be important.

III. CONTEXTUAL INTRODUCTION OR LEAD-IN

Does the article topic fit within a current lesson plan or recurring discussion?

Thompson analyzes six very different CNF pieces, covering a range of strategies through which diverse authors convey meaning, from the neatly-tied but powerful resolution of James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” to the more diaphanous echoes within Boully’s lyrical essay mentioned earlier. And so, a lead-in to the article might simply be a well-chosen menu of similarly powerful CNF pieces, wherein students can be guided in reflecting on the range of meanings that appear to them. At times, we need to help our students avoid defaulting to the idea of “open meanings,” an escape route wherein the meaning is whatever the heck you want it to be. Thompson’s article is an excellent resource for showing students how, while a text may support a range of interpretations, all are rooted in the artistic choices of the writer. As such, it would work well as an assigned reading and basis for discussion following students’ own reading of select CNF pieces. It also could be valuable at the revision stage of a work, perhaps as a diagnostic lens through which to examine issues and identify potentials within their own drafts.

IV. BROADER DISCUSSION POINTS AND QUESTIONS FOR STUDENTS

Are there examples beyond the article?

The nebulous issue of meaning is addressed at length in Alice LaPlante’s The Making of a Story, in the chapter, “What’s this Creative Work Really About?,” where she discusses meaning in terms of emotional transference. LaPlante asserts that writing operates on two levels: The first being the immediate sensory particulars of the narrative and the second, just as crucial, being an “emotional and intellectual subtext,” (p. 507). But these are not two separate discrete entities—we only get the second by means of the first. Thompson himself makes this clear right from the third paragraph, where he points out that it is the relationship created between all the specifics the writer has chosen to include that creates meaning, that merits careful attention. LaPlante’s chapter works well alongside Thompson because she explores more explicitly how writers can create meaning by linking emotional subtext to sensory objects, which then become “outward manifestations of interior movement or emotions,” (p. 510), an idea not far removed from TS Eliot’s objective correlative.

But what about hybrid forms such as the lyric essay, which proceeds, as the article acknowledges, through an accumulation of bits and pieces, whose goal is “not meaning but being,” as Judith Kitchen puts it (quoted by Thompson)? Yet even in this case, the specter of meaning has not vanished, since the lyric essay simply shifts more of the burden to the reader, asking him or her to do at least some of the work of knitting together the fragments. The seeming random choices add up to something, often by using repetition, creating a pattern of ideas, images, or sounds, that creating meaning through layering and accumulation. One of the best examples I can think of is Eula Biss’s “The Pain Scale,” in which she draws variously on Christian dogma and symbols, Dante’s Inferno, memories of her childhood and her physician father, her own experience of exquisite and torturous pain, mathematic puzzles, the Beaufort scale of wind forces and more—all divided into sections correlating with the ten levels of the pain scale used by health care workers. Any one section might appear random but, taken together, a carefully organized pattern quickly emerges and with it, an inquiry into the limits and expressions of human suffering. Thompson quotes Kitchen again, possibly in response to those readers who resist the idea that meaning may resound within as amorphous a form as the lyric essay, who suggests that at the very least, the writer needs to “understand that there is a question, something to be discovered in [the] associative process.”

V. POTENTIAL ACTIVITIES (TO BE COMPLETED IN CLASS AND/OR AS ASSIGNMENTS)

While it would likely not be a good idea to assign Thompson’s three-part structure as a kind of template for writing (please don’t!), the article would be a good accompaniment to assigned CNF readings, especially personal narratives, wherein students can practice their creative reading skills by identifying how and where each of Thompson’s three elements appears in the work. An accessible essay is David Sedaris’s memoir, “The Drama Bug,” which offers easily identified sequential events (what happened); a clearly defined moment of self-recognition (what changed); and a closing paragraph that sets out the meaning, as it appeared to the youthful Sedaris, but also extends further, beyond the hard limits of the recollected events to a generalized observation (what it means to the writer): “Acting is different than posing or pretending. When done with precision, it bears a striking resemblance to lying. Stripped of the costumes and grand gestures, it presents itself as an unquestionable truth,” an assertion that might just as equally be applied to creative writing. Admittedly, Sedaris’s conclusion, in its closed-ended explicitness, offers the neatly tied bow against which Thompson cautions, the danger being that such heavy-handed certainty forestalls any further contemplation by readers. Still, an inviting model with such easy-to-identify features can be reassuring to new writers, especially when coupled with more complex variations like Annie Dillard’s “Aces and Eights,” which Thompson uses as an example of an essay that deliberately avoids the pat, over-resolved ending and instead, invites readers to use what the writer has provided to work out meaning for themselves.

VI. RELATED READING

A. Serious Daring: Creative Writing in Four Genres, by Lisa Roney, Oxford University Press.

B. “Use the Five “R’s”: How to Write Creative Nonfiction,” by Catherin Gourley, Writing!, Sept. 2003.

C. “The Pain Scale,” by Eula Biss, SN Review, Spring/Summer 2015.

D. The Making of a Story, by Alice LaPlante, W.W. Norton.

E. “The Drama Bug,” from Naked, by David Sedaris, Little, Brown & Co.

VII. CONCLUSION

Students often find it easy (well, easier than, say, factoring binomials) to recount events from their own experience and memory but less easy to shape their recollections on the page in a way that conveys what the events meant to them personally. Thompson’s goal is to help students understand that meaning emerges through a writer’s artistic choices, thoughtful interpretation of facts and deliberate arrangement of details. This doesn’t necessarily mean prescriptive or formulaic writing since there are multiple ways that writers can evoke something akin to meaning, in the sense that Thompson uses the term, which encompasses concepts of wholeness (Judith Kitchen’s word), insight, wisdom, reflection and/or emotional resonance. To quote Sol LeWitt once more, “Conceptual art’s good only when the idea is good.” Ditto for CNF.

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Tanya Perkins's short stories and essays have appeared in numerous venues, most recently receiving the Masters Review 2021 Flash Fiction Prize. She is an assistant professor and chair of English at Indiana University East.