“It is a matter of proportion,” Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones say about the criteria they used for selecting essays for an anthology entitled In Short and published by W. W. Norton in 1996.  Noticing that nonfiction writers they admired were frequently writing very short prose, they realized that what mattered in an essay is “…how much the piece does for how long it is.” Both essayists themselves, the editors dubbed the short form of the personal essay they were finding, “Shorts,” essays that do a lot in a small space.  “No matter how brief, everything needed is there; an initial something moves somewhere, taking as long as it takes and no longer.  Length, depth, and wholeness, then, are the characteristics of Shorts.”

Many of us who read and write poetry and essays believe that prose and lyric writing are beginning to blend and no longer seem quite so distinct from one another.  And some of what is happening does apply to the form Kitchen and Jones call “Shorts.”  The pieces in their anthology rely heavily on imagery to convey emotion, delving right into the heart of the matter as a poem might with strategic opening lines, and closing the journey the essay makes with an ending that circles back to the opening but at the same time leaves the reader aware of how far she has journeyed.

This collection brings together such notable writers as Stuart Dybek, Maxine Kumin, Terry Tempest Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., William Kittredge, Ted Kooser, Pico Iyer, Joy Harjo, Andre Codrescu, Barry Lopez, Diane Ackerman, Tim O’Brien, Cynthia Ozick and Ted Kooser among seventy-six others.   Each individual essay is a meal; together they are a banquet!

Whether you read the essays cover to cover or dip into the book’s offerings, you will soon be heading to your journal, your files of unfinished essay drafts or the blank pages of a notebook to find the “initial something” that can “move somewhere.” The essays in this collection model succinct and dynamic ways of putting memories, meditations, quandaries and explorations on the page. After reading these essays, you will be aware of a variety of techniques authors you admire use to good advantage, and you might want to employ some of them to jumpstart and energize your own work.

 As Bernard Cooper, in his preface to In Short says, nonfiction writers use “an alertness to detail, a quickening of the senses, a focusing of the literary lens…until one has magnified some small aspect of what it means to be human.”  The aspect we illuminate may be small, but writing to illuminate it feels like a big responsibility to us nonfiction writers.  We expect to write our way to truth, to see more clearly and to meditate on life as we live it.   But no matter the size of the responsibility, using the essays in In Short as models, we learn we can fulfill our responsibility with short pieces, some even under one page.

Here are several approaches to using the anthology’s essays as models for writing well about your own experience:

You can study the essays in In Short for the effectiveness of their first lines and then see how you can copy the strategies of starting with such lines to reach your essay’s emotional center strongly and economically and build in an opportunity to end your essay when it has fulfilled its mission.

For instance, here is Sharon Bryan’s opening line in an essay from In Short entitled “Around the Corner”:  “When I was small, maybe seven or eight, I noticed some crinkled leather boots in my mother’s closet, some I knew I had never seen her wear.” From there the essayist writes about things she did see her mother doing and things her mother told her about her life before marriage and kids.  She writes about the shorthand she saw her mother use in her diary to ensure privacy and the way her mother lavished attention on her children.  Bryan ends her essay saying she appreciated her mother’s way of raising her, “Yet at the same time…I was haunted by the image of the person who seemed to have disappeared around the corner just before I arrived.”  The memory of those boots is not only in Bryan’s mind at that point, but also in the readers’ as we read “disappeared around the corner.”

If you want to write about a relative, friend, or other significant person in your life, think about a dimension of that person that you do not want to go unnoticed.  Then try Bryan’s strategy.  Start an essay by writing about something you see or at one time saw in its usual place:  an item of clothing in a closet, a tool on a workbench, a plant in a garden.  The item can be well worn and used or neglected. What is important is that you feel connected to the object when you are writing.  Let the image of that object take you into a story about the person you are describing.  By the time you feel you have written what you can about that person, look for a way back to the image you started with.  For example, if I were writing about a recently deceased aunt, I might remember the colorful dahlias she raised in her garden or was always sure to have filling a vase.  I might start, “Whenever I visited Aunt Shelly in summer, I checked her garden to see if the dahlias were in bloom.” After writing about the garden and other memories of Aunt Shelly, especially ones that show her spirited side, I might find an ending that employs the opening by realizing I am eager to start dressing in the colors of her dahlias to bring her spirit back and remember her influence on me.

In another of the book’s short selections, Tim O’Brien’s “LZGator, Vietnam, February 1994,” the very beginning reads:  I’m home, but the house is gone. Not a sandbag, not a nail or a scrap of wire.” O’Brien goes on to reconstruct the military base in Quang Ngai Province with many details concerning the way the soldiers took comforts such as hot showers, hot meals, cold beer, and blaring music behind bunkers and concertina wire.  He claims that the soldiers were fully alive taking pleasure in their bodies working correctly and “pressures approaching normal” for a short stretch of time.  He writes about mischief and then the difficult, deadly environment outside this base.  When he has finished writing memories, he ends: “…Gator has been utterly and forever erased from the earth.  Nothing here but ghosts and wind.”  We get the image not only of a base and time that are gone, but a glimpse into a personal and complex emotional landscape. We learn that the author can almost no longer access the pure, raw emotions he experienced in the war when both horror and temporary relief from horror made life intense.

You might wonder what would happen in your writing if you imagined standing somewhere where something of your past used to be.  It doesn’t have to be as heart wrenching as being in a war zone to work.   “I stand on the black asphalt,” you might write, “but my feet remember home plate.” Writing about your childhood softball league and the kids you played with, you might write your way to an ending inspired by the image you started with:  “All of those kids have kids who have kids now.  All of them far from this field.”

Another essay in the book that you might use for a model in utilizing interesting first lines is Richard Shelton’s “Nostalgia.”  In this essay, Richard Shelton ruminates about the way the world has changed.  He does this by asking about words and the concepts they name.  “Whatever happened to the crepuscular? It’s never mentioned anymore,” he asks in his opening lines.  You might feel you have to run to the dictionary for a definition of crepuscular, but he continues, “I remember sometimes at the time of day in the autumn when there was a chill in the air and somebody was burning leaves somewhere, I could nearly die of happiness. But I am older now and it’s illegal to burn leaves.”  Crepuscular describes something that has qualities of twilight, but even if you didn’t know what “that time of day in the autumn” was, you get an accurate emotional understanding of the word from Shelton’s images and statement that “I’m older now.”  By linking an infrequently used word with autumn, dusk and one’s later years, Shelton establishes an understanding that he isn’t just throwing a vocabulary word around. Because the word has meaning to him, after reading his essay, it may to you, too.  As reader, you proceed with him as he wonders about other words and the concepts they name:  “idyllic” and “bucolic,” “the grand passions” and “peace and quiet.” You get the feeling that he identifies with the old fashioned, so when he ends, “And whatever happened to kindness… “you feel the loss of old fashioned ideas, the way something might be missing in our lives and how we treat ourselves and one another.  No diatribe is necessary, just the way the soft spoken voice pulls us in to what seems like foreign thinking using odd words and turns out to be thinking on a subject we all care about.

If you wanted to do a mediation in writing on the state of society today, you could try Shelton’s strategy, using questions about words or events:  “What happened to the activity we engaged in as children making up skits to perform for the aunts and uncles and grandparents who sat cracking nuts and happily arguing after dinners at my cousins’ houses?”  You might write more questions asking about missing activities and pointing out the way children don’t try to entertain adults anymore because adults buy entertainment for children.  The trick here is to make sure you have specific and well-described personal memories attached to your questions so the reader is getting the texture of life as it was once lived.

If you want to try this strategy, take some time to gather questions that might lead to something interesting for you, “What happened to humid nights when families lined up for soft ice cream and left licking vanilla cones dipped in butterscotch and chocolate?” “What happened to leisure?  I remember being able to sit in the cool backyard with a book and lemonade.”

A third idea for using the essays in In Short as models for your own writing and revising is to notice the many essays in the collection that are written in sections or fragments, using mosaics to form an interesting whole.  You might start thinking about some of the very large topics you have desired to cover and find that you can actually cover them best in shorter essays written in parts. Sometimes death, horror, sorrow and love are too big for us to take on in narrative form. You will see reading many of the essays in In Short, that well-drawn fragments leap over white space and the asterisk that separate them.  In the readers’ minds they join into one piece that is stronger than what the author might have woven using the threads of story telling.

If you have something difficult to write about, try your hand at taking on that time in your life and writing a short essay about it by sharing memories without trying to join them. Include at least three. Order them in some way–past, present, future or by your age when the events occurred or by who they are about.  Through the images you share and the associations the reader makes among them, the tiles of your experience will join into a pathway through the emotional landscape of your experience.

One example you might study is Charles Simic’s essay, “Three Fragments” is composed of three war memories–one about getting lice from wearing a German helmet taken from a dead soldier’s head, one about eating watermelon with other children under a clear sky while bombs fell in the distance on another city and smoke rose from that ground and one about his mother’s memories of hearing a man plead for his life as her family was fleeing.  The act of reading the fragments one after the other as separate memories the author doesn’t try to connect forces one to let the images sink in and to realize they are about escaping death, right there beside you, above you and advancing.

In the essay “Sanctuary,” Jane Moress Schuster also writes in three sections. In the first, she describes the actions of her husband during the holocaust, a strong boy living with friends in a hole in the ground in the forest outside what had been their village. The entrance to their hole was under a small tree they lifted up to get in and out of the ground. They lived in the hole for two years.  In the second section, Schuster narrates a quiet day in the not distant past, when near a pond, her husband decides the couple should look for deer in the woods. They see wheat growing and her husband tells her how wheat saved his life when he and a friend left the hole to find food and soldiers shot at them, but the boys were lost from the soldier’s sight by dropping down in the tall wheat.  In her final section, Schuster reveals that they were lucky that day and did see deer, and how on an ongoing basis, she invokes the image of deer and wheat and her husband stooping to scoop grain.  She sees this as an offering to a god.  We know just how deeply she experiences the idea that she may never have met her husband, that he may never have had a life beyond boyhood, how unexplainable it seems that he was spared while the rest of his family and so many others were killed.

Think about ways you might use a fragmented structure to explore experience you find too large or difficult to write about.  If you are trying to write about divorce, for instance, you might choose anecdotes from before marriage, during marriage, and today.  You might see a theme emerge.  If you are trying to write about a child moving away, you might write about other times the child left–for a first overnight or summer camp, for baby sitting, for college, for a summer job.  You can trust that your unconscious has stored things in a meaningful way, and using fragments invites the unconscious to reveal the meaning it has kept.

Before closing his introduction to this anthology, Bernard Cooper states “the skilled essayist can imbue even the briefest text with the immediacy, momentum, and intellectual agility one expects from longer work.”  I believe that reading the essays in In Short will demonstrate this for you and provide you with important tools–the strategies of these ninety authors and their mastery.  The short essay is a marvel of emotional agility and articulation. When you adopt strategies from the Shorts for your own work, remember what the anthology’s editors said, “an initial something moves somewhere, taking as long as it takes and no longer.”  You cannot really know when you start how long that taking will be.  But you can learn to rely on useful structures to help you feel your way there.