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Exercise 4: Creative Nonfiction

Example: After John McPhee's "Swimming With Canoes." http://vault.sierraclub.org/sierra/201005/canoes.aspx

Step One. Pick an activity you have done many times, something that you'll be able to write about in detail from memory. Depending on the activity, you may want to choose just one aspect of it--"Swimming With Canoes" rather than "Canoeing"—because the broader the activity, the harder it will be to write a short essay rich in detail. If you chose "Exercising," that would be broad, and hard. If you chose "Wind Sprinting" or "Dunking" or "Fielding Grounders," you would have something a short essay could do justice to.

Step Two. Before you begin writing sentences and paragraphs, make a list of the specialized language associated with the activity. For instance: many years ago, I tended bar, and I could write an essay called "Mixing a Perfect Manhattan." (I like the sound of that, come to think of it, because bartending was what I did for a living when I first moved to New York, so the title is suggestive of larger meanings.) The specialized language for mixing a manhattan could include nouns: the jigger, the shaker, the strainer, the spill mat, the martini glass, the speed rack (where the cheap stuff is kept), the top shelf (where the pricey stuff is kept), dry vermouth, sweet vermouth, rye. It could include the brand names of spirits. It could include verbs: speed pouring, chilling, garnishing. Don't be stingy here. Put down every specialized word you can think of. 

Step Three. Still brainstorming, note any memorable, out-of-the-ordinary incidents that occurred while you were performing this activity. For my "Mixing a Pefect Manhattan" essay, I might note the time one of my regulars, a gentlemanly painter, Mr. Reid—African-American, always wore a tweed newsboy cap, and spoke in old-fashioned courtesies, "Good day, sir. I hope you are having a spendid afternoon," that sort of thing—suddenly could not recall where he was, or how he'd got there, and rose from his stool with a look of both confusion and fear, and hurried out the door, muttering apologies and forgetting his hat. McPhee, in "Swimming With Canoes," has his accident in the rapids.

Step Four. Write an essay in approximately four parts: 1) An introductory narrative paragraph of autobiography that introduces your activity. Feel free to model yours on McPhee's. Note how the specificity of language—"E. M. Whites and Chestnuts"; "wood-and-canvas keeled or keelless"—conveys his knowledge, his expertise. And note how his closing sentence at the end of his first paragraph introduces an idea, a theme, that suggests why swimming with canoes is meaningful but does not spell the meaning  out. 2) Drawing from your list of specialized words and using the second person ("you"), describe the activity precisely using active verbs and images that appeal to the senses. The goal here is to re-create the experience for the reader so that even if they've never done anything remotely resembling what you're writing about, they'll be able to imagine what doing it is like. 3) Switch from habitual/fixed action to moving action/scene. McPhee begins his transition to moving action by setting the scene at Battell Gorge in his fifth and sixth paragraphs. Then, after his section break, he gives us the scene: "One time, when I was about twelve . . ." Use the phrase "one time" or some variant thereof (once, one day, one night in September, etc.) to introduce your scene. Narrate the event precisely, moment by moment, using active verbs and doing your best to make your reader imagine it. 4) Still narrating, write a concluding paragraph that swerves briefly, for a few you sentences from narration to reflection ("Understand: I have a life-long tendency . . .," writes McPhee) and then back to narration for a final resonant moment or image.