Connecting the Unexpected in Creative Nonfiction

elichvar
22 hours ago
4 min read

October 9, 2025

by Lee Martin, fiction and creative nonfiction faculty

I’m taken these days with the popularity of the lyric essay, that form that relies on fragmentation and association and the skillful arrangement that connects the parts. Intuition leads us through the fragments we put on the page. Then at the end we find something—an image, a story, a surprising emotion or thought—that gives us faith in our instincts. We’ve chosen exactly the right details, memories, observations, thoughts, images, metaphors. Our random selection has brought us to some way of looking or knowing that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible.

The poet and essayist, Sydney Lea, offered some thoughts on what he called “the lyrical essay” in an article that appeared in The Writer’s Chronicle in February, 1999. This was early on in the explosion of the lyric essay that has continued with the work of such writers as Ander Monson, John D’Agata, Jenny Boully, Eula Biss, and many others, but Lea’s thoughts on how an essayist works by the art of indirection, dealing with seemingly disparate particulars, as he or she writes toward a point of connection, are still extremely relevant to this form as it’s practiced today.

Lea talked about the importance of having no predetermined subject, only a handful of particular details that have lodged in the essayist’s consciousness. He pointed out how the lyric essayist does better when he or she doesn’t know where the essay is headed so that observations have the feel of spontaneity. The meditative impulse of the essay places an emphasis on the writer’s mind in action with perception unfolding in the act of writing, an act of what Lea called “unanticipated discovery.” He stressed the importance of beginning with particulars before leaping into meditation, contemplation, musing, reminiscing, preaching, worrying, arguing, and perhaps even pontificating. We begin, in other words, with what the poet, Miller Williams, calls “the furniture of the world.” “I find that certain things have lodged themselves in my consciousness,” Lea wrote, “and now demand meditation, that they have ‘subjected’ me.” The lyric essayist, as Lea pointed out, seeks to connect a number of images or moments that demand the writer’s attention. In the process of writing, as Lea referenced Robert Frost, “we discover what we didn’t know we knew.”

To help anyone who has an interest in the lyric form, I designed this exercise. I first tried it out in a creative nonfiction workshop I was teaching. Here are its steps:

Make a list of three adjectives. Any three. Don’t think too hard. Just do it.
Make a list of three objects that have recently become “unforgettable” to you in some way. Three objects from the current time or the past that you can’t get out of your head.
Make a list of three abstractions but try to avoid nouns that could also be transitive verbs. Nothing that could be turned into a statement such as “I love x,” or “I hate y.” Stick with things like “limbo” or “harmony.”
Choose an adjective from your list, an object, and an abstraction. Do it in that order. Add a preposition or an article as necessary. Write the title of your essay (e.g. “Pretty Dog Leash in Limbo”). Note: now that you know you’re creating a title, feel free to switch out any of the words for others on your lists.
Write a few lines about the object you’ve chosen. Why have you been thinking about it lately? Give us a context for why this object is important to you.
Write a few lines that evoke the abstraction you’ve chosen without naming it. How does the abstraction convey your emotional response to the object? In what way does thinking about the object leave you unsettled, uncertain, or whatever your emotional response turns out to be?
Write a few lines that evoke the adjective you’ve chosen without naming it. Give us a sense of its relationship to the object. Is it ironic, for example, or genuine?
Write a few lines about another object, story, or memory that comes to you right now. We’re working with free association here. Look for words or phrases or images that subtly connect to what you’ve already written. If you need a prompt, here’s one: “When I think of that dog leash, I remember (fill in the blank with another object, a story, a memory).”
Make a direct statement about where the second object, story, or memory takes you in your thinking. Here’s a prompt: “I begin (or began) to think about (fill in the blank however you’d like).” The emphasis with this last step is to let the texture of the writing invite an abstract thought, conclusion, question, speculation, etc., thereby allowing the central line of inquiry of the essay to grow organically from what precedes it.

My students, in our post-writing debriefing, talked about how the exercise led them to unexpected connections, became a process of discovery, forced them to “push through” material that was a bit uncomfortable for them, and in general led them to things they wouldn’t have gotten to otherwise. I wish the same for you.

Lee Martin’s latest novel is The Evening Shades. His most recent essay, “The Down-Low,” appears in the current issue of The Cincinnati Review.