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This essay describes an approach to teaching the braided essay, highlighting the rewards and difficulties.
When I introduce the braided essay to my students, I quote Annie Dillard, who says the best writers "forge their own forms." "Nonfiction prose," she continues, "can also carry meaning in its structures." I want students to understand that, like most of the arts from poetry to pottery, form and content are wedded in literary nonfiction. Or at least they should be. The form a writer utilizes-from linear to lyric and everything in between-should depend on what the writer is trying to say, the subject of the piece. The trick, I tell my students, is not one of choosing a form the way one might choose an ice cream topping. Form is not a condiment added for flavor. Rather, the trick is one of perception, recognizing the form as it emerges from the ideas. And such perception, such nimbleness of mind, comes with time and experience. The more exposure writers have to the different constellations ideas can assume, the more ready they are to see the form their subjects require.
In most of the other arts, the question of form cannot be ignored. Abstract or representational? Functional or aesthetic? Symphony or quartet? Even in fiction and poetry, writers tend to think more consciously about form. A poet might weigh the advantages of free verse over villanelle, given the subject. A fiction writer might consider questions of length, sudden versus short. In nonfiction, though, we tend to write linearly, especially when writing memoir or personal essay. Our life, we think, unfolds along a narrative path-first this happened, then this, and then this-and should thus be rendered chronologically. But linearity is not the default form for creative nonfiction. In fact, it should not be the most obvious choice, given the way our lives and ideas twine and intertwine. Still, the pull of chronology, its driving narrative potential, is hard to ignore. We tend to begin where the story begins and plod ever forward.
But like point of view or character, form is a choice, one that literary nonfiction writers must consciously make. And to make that choice requires fluency with the many forms an essay might assume. Once writers see the...