The personal essay is on my mind a lot lately, and the same seems to be true for the Center community.
One of our recent monthly community-building Zooms that we do for all current and former Center students was on the topic of the essay; attendance was high, and we got a lot of questions about the different ways to structure essays. I launched a new course this spring, Writing the Personal Essay, and the writers who’ve taken it are energized and excited about short-form nonfiction writing in a way I didn’t expect. Braided essays? Hermit crab essays? Micro essays? They can’t get enough.
In preparing some weekly lessons for a part two of that course, I came across an exercise by Anne Panning in Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction (Rose Metal Press, 2012, ed. Dinty Moore) that I’m not only excited to share, but to try myself.
Panning’s lesson is on segmentation in essays. My students love braided essays, where you weave two or more stories together, and they like but are a little more intimidated by fragmented essays, which don’t necessarily rely on a straightforward narrative. The poets often like fragmented essays more, because of the emphasis on imagery and metaphor.
Segmented essays, and most flash or short nonfiction, Panning posits, rely on what she calls “active imagery—that is, the object must be set into motion by someone or something,” rather than just sitting there while the writer observes and describes it. She gives this trait a very academic name, thingy-ness, before going on to describe segmentation as giving an essay “a wheel plot…everything in brief essays (the 'spokes') points toward and supports the main idea/object (the 'axle') and makes the wheel spin.”
And then, she offers an exercise I have to share. It’s simplicity and clear steps will help even those who are most timid about narrative breaks to explore the connections between things, and to tackle thingy-ness as an approach to creating emotional tension in essays.
Anne Panning’s ABCs of the Segmented Essay exercise
1. Write the alphabet on a sheet of paper. Pick a letter and list as many things (objects, emotions, ideas, etc.) that begin with that letter as you can. Choose one word and write a paragraph about anything that comes to mind. Be specific.
2. Choose a second letter and repeat.
3. Choose a third letter and repeat. (Panning says you can repeat as many times as you want, but “three times works nicely.”)
4. “The next step, of course, is to realize that, although your two to three alphabet paragraphs may not, at first glance, seem to go together, with the right rearrangement and proper juxtaposition, they often can and do work together—quite naturally.” So, rearrange. Mine your three (or more) paragraphs for connections and themes, adjust or edit them to fit together better, and sit back to marvel at the creation of your segmented essay.
Panning adds that “this exercise also works well with other categories” besides the alphabet (“cities, states, or countries; seasons; numbers—pretty much any classification or category will work”) and cites Judith Kitchen’s use of colors to create short, segmented essays called “Blue,” “Green,” “Yellow,” etc. in her book Distance & Direction.
Are there other categories you can think of to use to organize a short essay? Will you try Panning’s segmentation exercise? Share with us in the comments.
Related reading: When stuck, write in scenes
Writing in pieces: In defense of fragments over finished products
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