STEP THREE: Prepare for your first braided essay
I knew straight away the essay would be braided. Grief is a type of fragmentation, recovery a type of assimilation. I wanted the essay’s structure to mirror this process: two independent narratives that gradually coalesce, one mythical and universal, the other ordinary and personal.
The memoir begins with this question: “To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like the sudden blood from under the bruised skin’s blister?” (3) This apt question and powerful text ushered students toward beginning to write their essays’ personal narrative strands.
(for example, the concept of surrogacy; physiological responses to systemic oppression; the intersection of religion and self-neglect)
This time, I asked students, a few days after that due date, to post a section from their response on a dedicated discussion board and respond to another student’s post.
What Is a Braided Essay in Writing
But maybe more importantly, at least from the writer’s perspective, braided essays require writers to learn to trust themselves and the workings of their subconscious minds. The best braided essays come about, I think, when writers wrestle with and twine together narrative strands between which they themselves don’t fully see the connections. The exercise of braiding, of twining, can be a process of discovery for the writer as well as the reader. So writers, trust yourselves. Trust in the work that your mind is doing. Grab ahold of those strands, grapple with them, bend them, weave them, and discover the remarkable light that this yoking of disparate times, places, and experiences can cast on your life.
An optional assignment: to interview someone from another subject position whose life had been impacted by the same social issue.
I introduced what would become the research strand via a scholarly source synthesis midterm paper of three peer-reviewed journal articles on their topic that presented successful approaches to ameliorating the social issue.
One key aspect of the is that these individual strands often seem, in the beginning, to not be connected to one another. The reader may at first experience a jarring feeling when two disparate items are juxtaposed, wrenched together, without explanation. Braided essays require two things of the reader: first, the reader must trust the writer; the reader must read without fully understanding the connections between, for example, a bristlecone pine tree and working at a cemetery. And second, the reader must be willing to work. Having come to the end of a braided essay, the reader must be willing to think about and make the connections, linking the parts now that the writer has provided all the pieces. That final connection happens in the reader’s mind, not on the page.
Finally, after writing several s myself, I discovered that —and others—had identified and written about this intriguing form. In (which itself is a braided essay), Miller describes her own dawning awareness of form in creative nonfiction:
How to Write a Braided Essay: Easy Steps & Examples
This may explain why braided essays are used by many authors to entertain readers including Joann Beard, Chelsea Biondolillo, and Anna Redsand to name a few.
Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay”
Photographers will wait days for the right light. In photography, light is everything. And this, I think, is true in braided essays as well. By bringing together unlike narratives, each strand provides a certain light that it casts on the others. Harsh noon sun, the long, somber shadows of twilight, and even the monochrome gray of an overcast sky create strikingly different images—even different realities. In writing, we often bounce the light of different times and different places off of our narratives. In a braided essay that I wrote later, I juxtaposed sitting in the shade of an oak tree in Nebraska with events that occurred a dozen years earlier in California. The light is different in Nebraska than in California, yes, but the greater difference is in time, not place. Being a twenty-something newspaper reporter casts a certain light on being a thirty-something mother—and vice versa.
What is a braided essay, and how do you write one
How distinct do the threads in a braided essay need to be and how regular does the movement between strands need to remain in order to guide readers through the piece?
The braided essay is the writers version of “found object” art
Among personal essays, braided essays are a form particularly welcoming to the vast array of ways—our obsessions, expertise, and contexts–that each of us uses to try to explain the personal.
A braided essay is a popular structure for creative nonfiction essays
Every assignment was a building block of this braided personal essay, including student’s identification of a personally meaningful social issue; readings of poems, essays, and novels along with written responses; guided free writes; personal narrative writing; instructor-student conferences; discussion board contributions and comments; a midterm research synthesis paper; interviews; responses to novels, television shows, and films; learning about and comparing and contrasting the hero’s and heroine’s journeys; a letter to one’s younger self; structure plans; peer review sessions, and a required revision round.