Jill Talbot’s braided essay & Lee Child on creating suspense.
It’s difficult for most people to verbalize the ways in which they disappoint themselves and others. The personal essay and the memoir demand that it be written down, perhaps even read aloud to others. The genre, I tell my students, is not for everyone. If you’re not comfortable with looking closely at where you have gone wrong or at least trying to find out why, you’re not going to be a good essayist.
—Jill Talbot, “Creating Nonfiction”
Jill Talbot is an acclaimed essayist and nonfiction theorist. Her braided essay “Emergent” has just appeared in the Paris Review, and I commend it to you. I predict you won’t be able to stop reading it because you’ll see what Talbot couldn’t see, the terrible danger that she and her young daughter were in. Multiple questions drive it forward as she lets the reader see what the apparent problem was even as she was oblivious to it in the wake of her move and her daughter’s seemingly separate issue. You’ll want to know how it comes out. And I love the way the essay’s braided structure deepens the foreground story and makes it seem even more real, more textured like life. Her memories and worries continue along with the slowly unfolding disaster, just as they surely do. This chilling story embodies so much more than its abundant explicit content.
In her essay “Creating Nonfiction” Talbot addresses the so-what-why-should-we-care issue I’ve been writing about:
In writing essays, you have to be more loyal to the art than the experience that created that art. A good place to start is by choosing an appropriate persona. It’s not enough to be an “I.” As I ask my students, Who are you for this piece? Because I believe that is the relationship between the persona and the essay. An essay demands a certain persona to achieve what it sets out to do. One of the ways I introduce the idea of persona is by making a list on the board of each of my varying personas, including ones like professor, mother, smoker, runner, writer, lover, seventies music aficionado.
Notice what this implies: You as a narrator are standing at least somewhat outside experience, delivering wisdom or at least testifying as to meaning. Talbot makes this explicit a little later:
When a student wrote about being raped at the age of twelve by her cousin, her workshop group grew visibly reticent from across the room. I usually stay out of workshops unless the group needs a new direction or an essay affords me an opportunity to make a point that will help all of the writers, but here, I purposefully broke in to remind them they were responding to the writing, not the written rape in any innovative or intriguing way. If an essay doesn’t bring a new voice or approach to its subject matter, don’t write it. If you write the essay as a surface catharsis, a confession, or for attention, the significance is yours only. What makes an essay move beyond the telling is when a reader, with or without a similar experience, can recognize a humanistic truth emerging from its words.
• • •
Part of the narrative puzzle: Ask a question to make readers care.
If you’re still reading, I must’ve hooked you with that “cheap trick” line. Sorry for making you feel craven and unclean, but I had to try it. And it’s not really cheap so much as comparatively easy and effective; we pose questions naturally but like all impulses in writing this move can become more effective when we use it consciously.
I’ve mentioned in a writing class a few times this semester how important narrative suspense is. That’s an overt or implicit question that keeps the reader reading. Overt questions like, “I couldn’t figure out why I’d acted that way,” propel the reader forward, as do implicit questions. How will the relationship come out? Does he live or die? Did her eating disorder get better? As we know, Verlyn Klinkenborg says in his new book on writing (reviewed) that implication is one of writing’s most powerful qualities because it lets readers grasp and figure out some of the narrative’s pieces for themselves.
Now suddenly I’ve remembered that, in December, a short New York Times essay by Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher series, addressed this issue. “A Simple Way to Create Suspense” mentions only fiction, but it applies directly to nonfiction as well. Child says posing a question can seem almost unfair because it works so well. I’m all for what works, however easy, because writing is concentrated thought and hard enough. And memoir always faces this “So what?” issue. He says you can make readers care by asking a question, since humans are compelled by curiosity about how questions are answered:
Readers are human, and humans seem programmed to wait for answers to questions they witness being asked. I learned that fact in my first job. I worked in television production from 1977 until 1995, and the business changed radically during that time, mainly because of one particular invention. It was something that almost no one had in 1980, and that almost everyone had in 1990, and it changed the game forever. We had to cope with it. We had to invent a solution to the serious problem it posed.
(You notice I haven’t told you what the invention was yet? I implied a question, and didn’t answer it. You’re waiting. You’re wondering, what did almost no one have in 1980 that almost everyone had in 1990? You’re definitely going to read the next paragraph, aren’t you? Thus the principle works in a micro sense, as well as in a macro one. Page to page, paragraph to paragraph, line to line — even within single sentences — imply a question first, and then answer it second. The reader learns to chase, and the momentum becomes unstoppable.)
What almost no one had in 1980 and almost everyone had in 1990 was a remote control. Previously, at the end of a segment or a program, we could be fairly sure the viewer wouldn’t change the channel on a whim, because changing the channel required the viewer to get off the sofa and cross the room. But afterward, changing the channel was easy, which was very dangerous for an audience-hungry station.
So how did we respond? (Notice the structure here? Wait for it!) We started asking questions before the commercials, and answering them afterward.
Whos’s that refected in the window taking the photo?
Good eye, dclaud! That’s me own fat self. Photo taken somewhere in the British Isles last summer, can’t remember exactly where now.
Excellent, as always, Richard. Answering two questions (at least) that are important to me quite often when I try (sometimes in desperation) to think of what I want to say 1) why should the reader care and 2) what’s my hook i.e., how can I “bring a new voice or approach to the subject matter.” These, though, as you also imply, are two versions of the same question, posed slightly differently.
Victoria, I think you’re well ahead of the pack if those already are among your early questions to yourself.
I love how you use the trick on us and explain it later.
I enjoyed the remote control explanation. Even though I was aware of the impact technology had on story structure of shows, you made it clearer and more vivid. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC teases you with her last segment from the beginning of the show. So do most “talk” shows.
Too flagrant flaunting of the trick, however, can turn a person off. If you waited a long time, and the wait wasn’t worth it, you stop turning the pages.
Another fun and helpful post. I’m tweeting it.
Thanks, Shirley. I HATE the way local TV news abuses the technique. By asking a question they do manage to interest us even if we’re not that interested in the subject, which proves it works and you feel strange saying to hell with it and changing the channel or turning it off.
Agree! The news often teases with a story and announces it will be on after a commercial break (they lie!). Follow up story is never delivered until after many commerical breaks. I turn it off because I can only take small doses of news in the first place.
Another great post, Richard. Can’t wait to read Jill’s essay.
Thanks so much, Darrelyn. I will be interested in your thoughts on Jill’s essay. They allow comments, and while many are positive there are some incredibly mean ones. I can see the essay not being one’s cup of tea, but to attack the author (basically for not seeing the problem and being a bad mother) seems weird as well as unkind.
I just read Emergent and it’s a solid, beautifully crafted essay. I also read the comments and agree some were just plain mean. I wanted to put my arms around Jill and Indie. Held my breath from beginning to end.
Thanks for reporting back, Darrelyn. So glad you liked it!
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