©S. Ingraham: lightshedder.com
When you set out to tell a story you assemble it out of parts...out
of objects, characters, and incidents (actions and reactions) that
really are, or could be...that really happened, or really could
happen, in the real world around us or in an imagined world with a
reality of its own. Words just stand in for the real objects,
characters, and incidents. Generally you arrange the parts of the
story in chronological order...in a natural “this happened
first, then this happened next” clock-time, or a seasonal
sun-moon-star-time sequence.
A personal narrative is the easiest kind of story to tell, because
the stuff we need to build the story is all right there in our
memories...it is our experience...the stuff of our lives. We have the
evidence of it all around us, in things we own, things we have
collected, in the places we live, in photographs, in home movies and
videos. Our friends and relations, the people of our communities, who
will be characters in our story, are still with us or fresh in our
memories. All we have to do is to pick out a set of memories...a set
of incidents, objects, and characters...and string them together on a
thread of time. Simple.
Of course there is some skill involved in finding the words to
describe, to stand in for, the objects, incidents, and characters.
Language has a life and a logic of its own...a wisdom built in over
centuries as the voices of individuals and cultures shaped the words
and phrases, the inner structure and relational underpinnings of the
tongue. It helps to have a good ear for language, for the way it is
spoken and used. It helps to have an effective vocabulary, to know
the names of a lot of particular objects and actions. It helps to
have a sense of the possibilities and potentials of simile and
metaphor and image, to know how to describe by using the contents of
the reader’s mind. It helps to have a love of language. Still,
if the memories are vivid enough, if we have a story we really want
to tell, the story will pretty much tell itself. The words will
come.
In the best stories, the relationship between the parts, the meaning
of the experiences, the sense we made of it all, will come to the
surface in the telling. If it gets said at all in so many words
(“and the moral of the story is...”) then the words, when
they do get said, come as a confirmation, a crystallization, of what
the readers are already thinking and feeling. Our readers or
listeners just come along with us as incident follows incident, as
characters act and react, until the readers make sense of it for
themselves. The words we use, the way we describe, nudges them along
toward our intended meaning, but they make the meaning for
themselves. That’s a good story.
In an invented story you are not, of course, limited to your own
experience. You can look for your objects, characters, and incidents
anywhere and everywhere there have been eyes to see and ears to hear.
You can search through everything that has happened to you, every
story you have ever read or heard, every thing you have ever learned,
to find the stuff to build your story. You can piece together
characters out of parts of several people. You can exaggerate. You
can create incidents based on the demands of the story. You can throw
a group of invented or assembled characters together in a time and
space and just see what happens. You can control time. You can make
it slow or zoom ahead, you can loop it back on itself, you can set up
parallel time flows, follow more than one character through the same
time frame, twist time to the limits of probability to suit the sense
of your narrative and the meaning you are building. Still, time is
time, no matter how it is twisted, we still have an intuitive
understanding of the way it goes.
Once again, a good story writer selects, or creates, parts for the
story and strings them together in such an inevitable way that the
reader or listener is lead to the meaning without the author ever
having to do more than put what we already know into words.
If you accept this metaphor for the process of writing a story, this
heuristic for the writing process itself, then I submit that it is
the root of the writing process no matter what kind of writing you
are doing.
Good writing is always built out of real objects, incidents, and
characters, represented by words, and strung together in some way
that makes sense and builds meaning.
Can you see where I am going with this?
If you can write a personal narrative, and understand what you are
doing, you should be able to write an essay.
A good essay is also built out of parts of the real world, the
difference being that the parts all come from a single source: the
work in question, the subject under discussion, the specific shared
experience of the writer and the reader. Instead of objects and
incidents, we have quotations and examples, references and summaries.
Instead of characters we have concepts. Instead of the people
themselves in action and reaction we have the ideas the people
espouse in comparison and contrast.
Instead of time as a thread, we have the thread of argument: cause
and effect, evidence and conclusion. In addition to making meaning,
we want to make a point (or maybe the point is the meaning we are
trying to make). Like a good story, a good essay strings example and
reference together on the thread of argument so inevitably that the
reader has little choice but to follow along. Like a good story, when
you put the conclusion in words, it should come to the reader as
confirmation or crystallization, since the reader has already made
meaning, and the reader’s meaning is your own.
Is our understanding of argument any less intuitive than our
understanding of time? I don’t think so. Certainly most children
I have known could argue before they could tell time. I have a
feeling argument is as hard wired into our brains as time is, as
deeply ingrained in language and the way we use words.
Where we fail is in thinking that essays are about ideas...built out
of ideas. They are built out of real things, example, reference,
summary. Where we fail is in trying to support our conclusions
rather than building our conclusions out of example and reference.
Where we fail is in forgetting that writing is writing...real things,
represented by words we all understand, strung together in a way that
makes sense and builds meaning.