A few years ago I accepted an invitation to serve on a dissertation committee for a brilliant guy who found writing very difficult. His dissertation, which he desired to turn into a popular book on sustainable farming, suffered from lack of an outline. He knew what he wanted to say, and he had done months of research, but his ideas were jumbled on all levels. Not only sentences and paragraphs but entire pages were out of place.
For example, all of the following ideas, a sentence or two devoted to each, occurred in one small paragraph.
- human connection to food
- farmers as expendable
- destruction of local economies
- industrialization
- spiritual separation from nature.
Needless to say, the paragraph made no logical sense, as if every thought was a non sequitur. It does not follow.
This writer’s subjects were interrelated, yes. So is all of life. So what? A reader needs to understand what you are trying to say. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing?
I marked up his manuscript. I marked spots in which multiple ideas and themes were thrown together in a single section, like a big old tossed salad. I pointed out possible chapters.
Creative nonfiction writers have to resist the urge to talk in circles (like the middle farmer in the photo). You know how much I, being a poet and a wild woman, am opposed to linearity, but I have to admit that, in order to be well understood, writing in a linear fashion—subject after subject, story after story, so that a reader can follow our thinking—is the way to go.
We open a feed sack. We lead a reader down a trail. We put a train on a track.
“My advice to you,” I told the PhD hopeful, “is to create a viable outline, not simply with chapter titles but with extensive listings under each chapter heading. Then use a pair of scissors to cut each page apart and re-form pages under appropriate headings. You have to write this in a more-systematic, less-random manner, or this manuscript is going to stay a jumbled mess, and you’ll stay confused and undirected. You shouldn’t do anything more here until you get the structure correct.”
Writing is hard work. It takes tremendous brainpower. It makes you crazy, it makes you want to scream.
I’m not going to speak to fiction or poetry, because they are different beasts. For creative nonfiction, if the structure is sound, the writing gets much, much easier.
(So you don’t worry about him, the candidate got his PhD.)
Leave a Reply