Thursday August 11, 2022; 7:17 AM EDT
- A passing thought: One way to organize a longer work of nonfiction or memoir, for the writer, is to seek stories and insights about both trouble and health. Tell stories about both, talk about both, let them each shed light on the other's nature.#
- I remember, too, speaking with Carl Klaus, one of the powerful group of faculty members teaching courses in nonfiction, prose style, the essay, and related topics in the graduate Nonfiction writing program at U of Iowa. He told me in a conversation once, several years ago, that he liked to organize reading and writing classes around pairs of concepts like these:#
- The inner story and the outer story.#
- The story of thought and the story of emotion.#
- You could see new things about a classic essay works, or how a draft could be revised, if you asked the class, or yourself as a writer, questions about those pairs of terms. For example:#
- In this draft, is the outer story (of experience) clear all the way through? Does the parallel story, the inner story of a person, say, develop clearly all the way through? In revision, where might something be given more attention in either the inner or outer story?#
- In this draft, how do the two threads of thought and of emotion develop along the path of the essay? Where might one of them benefit from more attention in revision?#
- In revising, something often benefits from being presented more fully, with a finer grain, then, and terms like these help a writer pay think about making it so. For a reader, they can be a way of seeing more clearly how the greats have managed such things in the past, too.#