Terrific Raw Material. Now What Are You Going To DO With It?

Finding the right prose form can make or break your hard work

Photo by Ksenia Yakovleva on Unsplash

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When we stare at the raw material of our lives or families or observations, we can know it’s worth writing about without having any idea which form that writing should take.

Hello Loreates,

In the gap between manuscript delivery and copy edits, I’ve returned to my never-ending personal project of essays about my father. I was therefore grateful to

Amy Brown

for leading me to last week’s

Memoir Land

interview with essayist

Nicole Graev Lipson

, who admitted, reassuringly:

I always feel a little indignant, when I begin a new essay, to discover that I’ve forgotten how to write one. You would think that the process would get easier every time, and that having done this before would prepare a person do it again. But not so! Every time I’ve re-read one of my published essays, I’ve thought, How the hell did I do that? It feels so unfair that I must start from scratch every time, but I’m sure this invention process is what gives a piece of writing a soul.

I agree that the process never gets easier, but I don’t agree that we start from scratch every time we begin again. In fact, I think the biggest obstacle is often that we start with so much material, including our own written scraps and documents accumulated over years, that we feel we ought to be able to whip it into shape overnight and be done already. I certainly feel that way as I stare down the hundreds of pages I’ve written about my family as blog posts, journal entries, short stories, novels, and memoirs, as well as the countless pieces by and about my father from his archives.

Into that muddle last week came my dear friend

Claudia Presto

asking for advice about her work, which currently consists of chapters and blog posts chronicling important transformations in her personal life. Her request, combined with my own eternal struggles, prompted today’s post.

I’m not going to focus here as I did last time on shaping your story’s structure; my goal today is to help you more broadly determine which macro prose form is best suited to your material, your intentions, and your constraints. These forms include memoir, personal essay, journalistic essays, and fiction. Each attracts audiences with different expectations. Which is right for your material? That depends on you.

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Fiction was made for writers who need to make stuff up.

What’s Your Form?