This is, Quite Literally, What a Personal Essay Looks Like

In this visual guide from Creative Nonfiction magazine, learn about the basic "shapes" of memoir writing—and achieve a more personal, unique result in your work.

I like to draw my students’ essays on the classroom blackboard. Beginning writers are surprised to see their writing represented this way, rendered by my sloppy hand, reflected back at them as a squiggly line, a series of hills, two boxes next to one another, representing the two major movements in the essay. We can talk all we want in workshop about how an essay behaves, but I think seeing the journey an essay takes a reader on is key to thinking through revision. I’ve been teaching this Tim Bascom essay the last few semesters to students who have been through at least one round of workshopping an early draft. Bascom’s essay takes writers who are between drafts through a two-part process: First, students can see which of the structures posited most closely matches their draft. Then, they can scope out other shapes they’d like to try, either in revision or in a future essay. Many of us first write in the form that most closely mirrors how our minds and memory work. Bascom’s essay give…