Across twenty years of teaching creative writing, and fifteen of being the nonfiction editor at Barrelhouse, I have read thousands of drafts of personal essays and memoirs, in every imaginable style and voice. I have consumed all manner of trauma and triumph. Seen every misstep an author can possibly make. Watched in horror, at times, as a strong piece has gone off the rails or (more commonly) run out of steam along the way. Though each essay presents its own unique puzzles, the most common note I offer my students is to free yourself from the tyranny of chronology.
One of the most often neglected tools at the memoirist’s disposal is the ability to bend time. (Please note: Although some view memoir and personal essay as distinct genres, I am using these two terms interchangeably throughout this piece, in part because the craft ideas apply equally to both and in part because it’s a distinction that is not especially important to me.) I first made this discovery while slogging through the middle drafts of my own work, bored but unwilling to admit to myself that it was boredom. As any editor will tell you, the most difficult submissions to evaluate are not the poorly edited and sloppy ones—those you can discard with ease—but the highly competent ones that for some reason just don’t click. For me, essays in this category often exhibit one or more of the following traits: lack of surprise; lack of complexity in the author’s own understanding of the story; straight-ahead bulldozing prose; strict chronological structure. I’m focusing here on that final element because it encompasses the others. Too often, personal essay often takes the form of a straight chronological retelling of an incident from the author’s life, and even if it includes some effort to contextualize the incident, to impose some retrospective meaning on it, or (quite popularly) to “braid” it, you’re still left with a story that progresses dutifully from point A to point B in a relatively straight line.