Too Vast for Words: Writing Prompts for Large Subjects

The essay is a grapple, a cheerfully desperate attempt to drape words on thoughts or emotions  mostly too vast for words.
                                    —Brian Doyle

By Marcia Aldrich

What writer among us hasn’t felt overwhelmed by the enormity of the subject before us? In teaching student writers I realized that they needed strategies to tackle a large subject, to come at it from the side or through the back door—to sneak up on it, so to speak.

One unit I taught in creative nonfiction classes was “A Nonfiction Place.” I asked students to create a small portrait of a place by experimenting with a collage of segments. They were to include at least three different kinds of segments and assemble them in a way that was unified and aesthetically pleasing. Among my suggestions for possible segments were these:

• A meditation on an observed color
• Targeting a particular sense, say sound or smell
• Recreating overheard dialogue
• Memories of other places
• A found poem
• A weather forecast

These suggestions were meant to break down and break open a subject that might be too vast to approach head on. The focus on a variety of segments meant these writers could describe manageable pieces of the place, not everything about it all at once.

I also shrank the task by choosing the place to be described. I picked a spot we all knew, the fountain plaza on campus, which we visited during a class period. Once there, students could spread out and experience the fountain and its environs from different angles. The spot had the advantage of being both known and unnoticed, because most of us passed through on our way to somewhere else. It was ripe for beginning writers absorbing fresh perceptions.

The first time one of my classes visited the fountain was a day in March, which, in the northern Midwest, is plenty cold. The fountain was shut off and was filled with snow. Yet the dismal conditions produced vivid, meditative writing. Occupied by the bitter weather and the formal requirements of the assignment, the students were freed from anxiety about what to say and became more satisfied, more creative writers.

Composing free verse, Robert Frost said, is like playing tennis without a net. The net sets limits that make the game. Formal rules and similar restrictions likewise help beginning writers up their game.

And not just beginning writers. I took my own assignment for a test drive to learn what its hidden difficulties were. I was surprised by what the connected yet segmented parcels led to. Like the students, I discovered complicated layers of emotion, reaching new crossroads and textual intersections. The essay I wrote, “Not a Good Day for Planting Root Crops,” was published in Brevity. If you follow the link, you can see how I took my own suggestions to heart.

In my new collection, Studio of the Voice, many of the essays take shape-shifting forms. One of them, “The Structure of Trouble,” tackles an intimidating topic: my mother and her depressive moods, which shaped me my whole life. It’s a subject I couldn’t enter head-on.

This essay too began in a creative nonfiction classroom. The assignment was to build an essay on one word. The seeds of this assignment were sewn when as editor of Fourth Genre I worked with Joy Castro on her essay “Grip.” The multiple meanings of the word grip played a crucial role in shaping the powerful reading of her lyric essay. For my assignment, students began by making a list of ten words (the number is arbitrary) that play a role in their lives, then picked one that compelled them, even (and especially) if they didn’t understand why. It’s best if some mystery draws the writer to the term. I myself chose a common word, trouble, which captured something of what I felt about my mother. I had written in one of my journals, “The trouble with troubled relationships is they’re troubling. And when that relationship is with one’s parents and has been troubled since birth, then one’s life is framed by that trouble.”

We all began by scribbling associations with our word. This part of the process can spill outside the classroom and produce a lot of material. Prompts can help:

• Do you have a history with this word? How long has it been important to you?
• Why this word and not near synonyms?
• Is it part of a song or movie or book that matters to you?
• Does your sense of the word differ from what other people might think of it? If so, how?

We were beginning to take possession of our word to use and define it. In my own explorations, I leafed through my journals, which confirmed that trouble popped up with urgent frequency around my parents. I amassed anecdotes and recollections and questions, most in the form of short paragraphs, landing on a tentative title, “What I Think About When I Think About Trouble.”

After we selected from our materials, the next task was to create a narrative, using a “found” structure, such as an outline or an inventory or a diagram, or a companion, or a syllabus. We emptied that form of its accustomed contents and filled it with our associations. Here the discipline of the form provides shape and license to writing that can be overwhelmingly personal.

I first assembled my elements in a formal outline. But I gave that up because the material wasn’t orderly enough. I also saw that whatever I had to say wasn’t driven by the conventions of plot. Thinking and feeling were my mode, a story that required a freer organization. I dropped the numbers and letters and settled on headings and indents and lots of white space that implied analytical precision but opened up to hold the pieces I had assembled. This relaxed outline form pushed aside the clotted “I” and dispersed it into multiple roles and selves. My thinking became more subtle and complex, and I could address my overwhelming, troubled subject.

In both of these essays that began in exercises, I saw once again that, through form, the writer can make personal and surprising essays out of the vast.
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Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing, published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story, which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty-First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press. Her essay collection, Studio of the Voice, is forthcoming Feb. 1, 2024, from Wandering Aengus Press. Her essays have been included in The Best American Essays.