Essay Advice, An Arranged Marriage

I was twelve when I saw the House of the Future.

When the Symbolist poets spoke of “Le Livre,” the voluminous book into which all experience settles as a beautiful language, it is improbable, but not impossible, that they had someone like my mother in mind.

I struggled with algebraic equations, always at a loss for x.

*********************************************************************************

*********************************************************************************

What do these sentences have in common?  Each of them is the first sentence to an essay in Bernard Cooper’s wonderful collection, Maps To Anywhere.

I sat in the back of the police car.

Grandma started in about the rats again today, the 6 foot ones.

Driving these streets with Susan is like tracing monastery rooms on a roadmap.

What does these sentences have in common? Each of them is the first sentence of an essay submitted for admission to selective colleges and universities.

Do Cooper’s opening sentences have anything in common with the sentences submitted by hopeful high school students?

I would say the answer is yes and I would further argue that there needs to be an effort made to introduce the two genres, the college admission essay and what has come to be called the flash essay, to each other for what I hope will be a fruitful union.

What do the sentences have in common? I will again borrow words:

“The brief essay needs to be hot from the first sentence, and the heat must remain the entire time. My fire metaphor, it is important to note, does not refer to incendiary subject matter. The heat might come from language, from image, from voice or point of view, from revelation or suspense, but there must always be a burning urgency of some sort, translated though each sentence, starting with the first.”

These words are from Dinty Moore’s introductory essay in the recently published The Rose Metal Press Field Guide To Writing Flash Nonfiction.

He says beautifully what a writer must do in a short in a flash essay.  For those not familiar with the term, a flash essay is a relatively new phenomenon, although its history can be traced back to the gnomic utterances of Heraclitus in ancient Greece.

What a flash essays attempts to do, to quote Moore again, is: “to capture the reader’s attention and imagination in the first few words, and to hold it—uninterrupted—until the final period”.

The challenge is to do this in a short form somewhere between a few hundred to a one or two thousand words, To quote Moore again, the best flash work “could never work in the longer form because the energy of the piece hinges on the rapid-fire sharing of information. The urgency of having to fit the content into an abbreviated frame is what makes it so powerful.”

Here are several defining characteristics:

1        A memory charged by an emotional experience,

            An image/object/symbol that’s inextricably bound to that memory,

           And an editor’s chisel to chip away at the excess detail, dialogue, and description 


The editors of the Field Guide quote Cooper too and then state what a great nonfiction essay should be:

 “‘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’.

Some small aspect of what it means to be human—a binding force full of craft essay possibilities. Also a tall order, but one that gets at the heart of what’s so compelling about good flash nonfiction: the writer’s experience of the world made small and large at the same time.”

The essay should then be: individual, intimate, exploratory, and carefully crafted using metaphor, sensory language, and precise detail.

I know I could not give such cogent advice on this topic so I have appropriated the words of great writers. I do, however, have an observation. The words used to define flash fiction apply equally to the open-ended essay question that most colleges and universities use in their evaluation.

The common application: topic of your choice option permits students to approach essays creatively and using the same skill sets set forth by these editors and writers.

Therefore, I would like to make a modest proposal:

Do you, Common Essay Open Topic agree to enter in a relationship with the Flash Essay? 

From all I can tell, you two have so much in common and so much to gain from spending time together that I think it would be a huge missed opportunity for each of you should you not at least begin a dialogue. 

What do you say?

What do You say?

“Let not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.” Shakespeare