There is a place for essays of every length in the world of creative nonfiction. Susan Bono, publisher and editor of  Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, offers us some thoughts on writing short personal essays as well as examples of her own.  Noticing what subjects appeal to you and how you place yourself in your story can help you write tight, essential prose. Increasingly, there is a market for short prose in online magazines such as Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. You can also read this prose in anthologies such as Short Takes, In Short and In Brief. Although Tiny Lights publishes longer essays as well as Susan’s column, one of her favorite offerings is a quarterly online venue for work up to 500 words called “Flash in the Pan.” She invites you to contribute.  Editor’s note: To meet Susan in person, consider joining us on the Writing It Real May Writing Istanbul trip!

These days I’ve been thinking about limits. How much room do you need to tell your story? I think every writer has a natural set point that influences the size and shape of their narratives. Some writers are attracted to ideas that require a novel to express, while others gravitate toward poems. We all have our preferences and we don’t like to being confined by others’ demands. However, word limits are actually helpful tools to good writing. Like an architect designing a building, a writer must take into consideration the size of the space to be filled.

For me, my favorite space has become the last page of my magazine, the 300-500 words I call “Editor’s Notes.” I admit that one of the pleasures in writing this column is the iron-clad guarantee that no editor will reject me. On the other hand, I always worry that I have simply indulged myself and created something that’s no good. But for more than 17 years, that’s space I’m responsible for filling. Knowing my limit helps define the way I choose my topics and the manner in which I consider them. Being confined to such a small space, I have to include only what I consider  essential.

The most useful question I find myself asking in a short piece of writing is this: how close can I get to a big idea in just a few words? At the beginning, I used to think I needed to stand back and observe a situation from a distance to get a glimpse of the bigger picture. The “Notes” from Contest 1997 are a good example (see below)—I even increase my sense of separation by placing window glass between me and my subject matter!  But as the years have gone on, I feel I’m developing ways to step closer to people and issues that affect me deeply. So in a strange way, my smaller pieces are getting bigger!

I chose these examples hoping they would demonstrate that big things can come in small packages, but in doing so, I also became interested in the position of the narrator, whether she is looking at her town through a picture window or is in a hospital room with her dying father, and how her distance from her subject, both physically and philosophically, affects the narrative. I started thinking of these locations as camera angles that can shift from one paragraph to the next. Becoming aware of these varying distances can help writers express the changing emotions and realizations in their stories. Sometimes we need to move closer for clarity, but sometimes we need to pull back. In longer pieces, this pulling in and out may happen many times, but it becomes more obvious in shorter work.  Each of the following essays uses a different combination of camera angles—ones you could incorporate into your own writing.

Contest 1997 Editor’ Notes

345 words

In this piece, I take a stance and maintain a considerable distance (at least until the last paragraph)—as an outsider yearning to connect:

From the windows of my house on this high hill, I can look out over the lights of our town. On summer evenings, when even the leaves hold their stillness, I wander the older neighborhoods on sidewalks cracked by shifting roots and earth. Years ago, before the thick branches of the walnuts crossed like fingers over wishes, I would have passed people sitting on these lovely porches, or tending their gardens in the deepening twilight. Children would have been zigzagging across the streets and lawns, their shouts ribboning behind them. I would have been greeted by those who knew my name, and my presence would have added a piece to the story of their days.

These evenings, the porches no longer seem lit for welcome. They have become sentry boxes with invisible, watching eyes. No one is ever using the carefully arranged  all-weather furniture. I walk past the windows of darkened parlors and dining rooms. Home life is now lived deeper, away from the street.

So I am grateful for the occasional glimpse of a dog pushing its nose under the sash of an open window, a young girl examining herself in the mirror, a man reading in a pool of amber light. Every now and then, I will see a front door thrown open to discharge a group of visitors, who turn and call to the others still lingering on the threshold. I sometimes hear the light clatter of silverware and conversation, or music lilting from a stereo.

It is in these moments that I have come to understand my love for personal essay. I need something to offset the sense that I am traveling in an increasingly deserted landscape. It is not enough to move through the darkness, admiring the silhouettes of roof lines against the dimming sky, to note the rise of a crescent moon. Sometimes I need to have the stories, often told in silence, that are taking place in the realms behind all that wood and glass. Those stories become lamps along the path toward my ever more secretive kind.

Contest 1998  Editor’s Notes

490 words

Here I start with a close-up and then step back to get a bigger picture:

Our four families have gathered at a country home in the tawny hills south of Sebastopol. Strawberry margaritas and good barbecue have lifted our spirits and loosened our laughs. The adults cluster around the Ping-Pong table in the garage, while our eleven children play outside in the growing darkness. The toddlers, gleefully occupied near the open rollup doors, remind some of us of where we’ve so recently been, while the teens give others glimpses of what is to follow as they flirt with the shadows at the end of the driveway. Under the light of two bare bulbs, we swat at blue, green, orange, and purple Ping-Pong balls, complaining good-naturedly over the absence of white ones. We settle on orange as the easiest on our aging eyes, and start popping it back and forth across the stiff lace of the net.

But the ball in this soft, shadowy light is almost impossible for me to see. With an increasingly familiar sense of despair, I add this scenario to the growing list of others in which parts of the world have disappeared. I make many wild swipes into emptiness before I learn to observe the angle of my opponent’s arm, the tension in her wrist, the sound of the ball making contact with the paddle. Relying on these cues, I can sometimes anticipate the place in the blur where the ball will appear, and use my failing reflexes to meet it there.

But I soon hand over my paddle for a chance at some solitude. The back deck presents a view of the nighttime sky lightened around the edges by the glow of the nearby town. Although I have factored in the brightness of the moon, the city’s lights, the reluctant shift of my rods and cones, once again, my eyes fail me. I stand there trying to imagine the many stars that would not be invisible to my thirteen year old son. I can only open slowly to my faith in their existence, the glory of their remembered sparkle. I must settle for the way those distant lights silver the branches of the pine trees, glint in the movements of a cat prowling the shrubbery, add sheen to the night wind.

Lights flick on behind me in the family room. The party has moved inside. Giggles and exclamations over the homemade peach ice cream and cobbler float out the open kitchen window. I watch through the sliding glass door as the little ones gobble their fill from the ends of their mothers’ spoons. My gaze moves among them as they play in a scatter of bright plastic blocks, the room light like the glow of candles on the altar of a darkened church. The youngest cuddles in the arms of his drowsily smiling mother. Some of the men tussle over second helpings at the counter. In this moment, everything is close enough, clear enough, moving slowly enough. My eyes work perfectly.

Flashpoints 2009 Editor’s Notes

233 words

The focus feels pretty tight here—except for the stepped-back musings in the middle paragraph which are intended to give power to the last. Thinking only in terms of camera movement, I wonder if I really need the philosophizing section. If my limit were 150 words, that’s where I would cut:

“That’s quite a sack of rocks you’re carrying, sweetie,” my father’s friend Bruce said more than once during phone calls in last year of Dad’s life. It was his way of acknowledging how heavily Dad’s hard-headedness and self-imposed isolation weighed on me. But I also took it as a tribute to Dad’s stubbornness and my strength, too.

“Dumb as a rock” never made much sense to me, since stone strikes me as having its own unassailable intelligence. Its ability to endure illustrates its genius. I have never believed the ability to factor equations or compose sonnets was proof of brain power, although I shared with Dad the idea that someone with rocks in his head was lacking in foresight and flexibility. Rocks may be smart, but they are slow. Time measured in stone is something else again.

There were times during my dad’s dying that were as slow as serpentine, sandstone, rose quartz, chert. His unseeing eyes were obsidian, and the pauses between breaths were long enough to form fossils. But just after that great wave rolled down from the crown of his head, darkening the air around him so his spirit glowed like a white shell at the bottom of a silty river, a tear slid from beneath his closed eyelids. That’s when the sack of rocks fell empty at my feet and I was surrounded by the tumult of released wings.

Contest 2011 Editor’s Notes

493 words

This piece begins with a long shot and then moves close.

Another September day over and done with, and I spent all of fifteen minutes outside in it. Here in Sonoma County the weather is perfect: morning fog melts into afternoons sweet with heat and long, diamond-cool shadows. Darkness arrives earlier each evening, as if night’s reservoir has filled during the summer months and is now spilling over. Every morning, more maple leaves litter my patio and crunch underfoot, releasing the scent of old books, furniture polish, and attic dust. Foolishly, I wonder if those leaves were ready to fall and what made them let go.

Thoughts like these tell me I am entering my annual season of melancholy. It’s the same one that used to pedal with me into the slanting light as I rode my bike alone after school, anticipating the clear fires of sunset and filled with a yearning that rose like the big moon outside my bedroom window for autumn to go on forever. But these days I hardly look up from my computer or let the bounty of harvest time really stir me. My pleasure in it feels thin, threadbare. I am too busy, I tell myself, I’ll find time tomorrow, even though I know it’s a lie.

How can it be that as a child I knew enough not to waste the gift of autumn melancholy? In many ways I was even busier than I am now. I spent the shortening days getting myself to and from school, struggling with unwieldy concepts from the cage of my school desk, struggling harder still on the playground with my social unease. The afternoons and evenings were filled with music lessons, chores, homework, and “My Three Sons” on a black and white TV. But I still found time to savor the treasure of these days. What has changed in my own mind and heart that allows all this beauty to perish unwitnessed?

Last week, I was in southern California with my mother-in-law when she was wheeled outside on a gurney for ambulance transport to a nursing home. The moment the sun touched her face, she turned toward it, greedily taking its warmth into every cell. It had been over a month since she had basked in its light, and I don’t know when or if she’ll be touched by it again. There she was in a smoggy parking lot, for a communion that should have taken place in a cathedral of silence, trees and sky. I was heartsick thinking of the poorness of this gift, but the expression on her face reflected only gratitude.

That look should have been the reminder I needed to glory in autumn’s fullness while I can, but no, my season of inattention persists, along with a belief that I did not hold as a child, that time is something I can afford to waste. Tomorrow, more leaves will drop on the patio. Another perfect day will end. All this letting go. All this, ready or not.

****

It’s personal essay contest time at Tiny Lights: A Journal of Personal Narrative, and I see writers struggling with my deadlines and word limits. “Why get so picky about length?” contest entering writers wonder. I try to explain that a 2,500 word essay is not a 2,000 word essay, in part because the writer of the former gets up to 2 more pages to develop her ideas. That can create an unfair advantage and certainly produces a different kind of reading experience. That’s why in 2001, I ended up creating a “flash” category for the contest. It is frustrating comparing 3-page essays with 6-page ones. Of course, that does not eliminate the fact that some brief essays can read like the New York City phone book while 1,900 well-chosen words can enter the heart in what seems like one deep breath. That’s another issue.