whats a braided essay

How to Write a Braided Essay: Easy Steps & Example

Icon Calendar 15 May 2024
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Importance of Writing a Braided Essay

As a literary form, a braided essay is unique for its distinctive ability to weave together multiple narrative strands or threads (from 2 to 4), creating a new and complex piece of ideas and themes. This structure is crucial in academic writing for its ability to explore topics from various angles. In a braided essay, each strand or thread, such as a personal anecdote, historical analysis, or theoretical exploration, maintains its distinctive role and perspective, and it is connected to other strands or threads, creating a harmonious and coherent whole work. This method is effective in illustrating how different elements can be connected to each other, indicating new layers of meaning and understanding. By following a linear narrative style dominant in traditional academic essays, a braided structure enables a more holistic and reflective exploration of subjects. This form of writing also engages readers actively, compels them to draw connections between various strands or threads, and promotes a more engaged and critical approach to reading and interpretation.

What Is a Braided Essay and Its Definition

According to its definition, a braided essay is a distinctive literary form of writing characterized by the interweaving of several narratives or threads of thought (from 2 to 4), much like strands in a braid. Each strand or thread in a braided essay stands as a self-contained narrative, claim, or argument. For writers, the purpose of using a braided narrative structure is to connect different themes from multiple perspectives, leading to a new understanding of topics under analysis. Moreover, a braided essay structure can follow not only a linear narrative writing format but also a more complex arrangement that reflects various connections to life experiences and ideas. A braiding technique also enables writers to use personal anecdotes with scholarly research or historical events. In turn, this form of the synthesis of personal and external elements results in writing new insights and perspectives about storytelling and creative nonfiction.

How to Write a Braided Essay: Easy Steps & Example

How to Start a Braided Essay in 5 Steps

Like any other types of essays , starting a braided paper requires a thoughtful approach to set the stage for a correct weaving of narratives. Begin by introducing your central theme or question, which is an anchor that ties your strands together. Then, focus on each narrative thread, writing about stories or ideas you plan to connect. A strong start in a braided essay is like separating your strands before weaving them into a cohesive and beautiful whole.

1. Identify Distinctive Strands (2-4 Threads)

Begin by identifying different strands or narratives that you will intertwine in your essay. These threads may include personal anecdotes, stories, historical events, research findings, or theoretical discussions. Each thread should be distinctive and relevant to the theme of your essay.

2. Develop Each Strand Individually

Before intertwining strands, develop each thread separately to ensure it is coherent and complete in itself. This aspect involves fleshing out the details, arguments, or stories within each thread, ensuring they are engaging and well-articulated in your braided essay.

3. Interweave Strands

Start braiding all chosen strands together. It involves making connections between different narratives at critical points. The transition between threads should be smooth and logical, allowing readers to follow the flow of a braided essay without confusion.

4. Highlight Connections and Contrasts

As you weave all chosen strands, highlight their connections and contrasts. This stage is crucial in writing a braided essay, as it improves the writer’s understanding of the topic by providing multiple perspectives and layers of meaning.

5. Conclude With Synthesis

In the end of writing, synthesize all the insights gained from interwoven narratives. It does not necessarily mean providing a resolution but offering a reflective overview of how intertwined threads contribute to a deeper understanding of a braided essay’s central theme.

Examples of Braided Essay Topics

Climate Change: Personal Impact and Global Policies
Cultural Identity: Exploring Heritage and Modern Influences
The Intersection of Art and Science in Historical Contexts
Mental Health: Personal Experiences vs. Societal Perceptions
The Influence of Technology on Human Relationships
Journeys in Nature: Personal Adventures and Environmental Conservation
Food Culture: Family Traditions and Global Cuisines
The Role of Music in Personal Development and Cultural Expression
Education Systems: Personal Learning Experiences and Theoretical Frameworks
Migration Stories: Personal Narratives and Political Contexts
Urban vs. Rural Living: A Personal and Sociological Perspective
Fitness and Wellness: Personal Goals and Healthcare Systems
The Evolution of Communication: From Letters to Digital Media
Fashion Trends: Personal Style and Historical Influences
Language and Identity: Personal Linguistic Journey and Sociolinguistics
Travel and Discovery: Personal Expeditions and Historical Explorers
Parenting Styles: Personal Experiences and Psychological Theories
Social Media: Personal Use and Its Impact on Society
Work-Life Balance: Personal Strategies and Corporate Policies
Volunteering: Personal Motivations and Community Benefits
The Changing Landscape of News Consumption: From Print to Digital
Gender Roles: Personal Experiences and Societal Expectations
Space Exploration: Personal Fascination and Scientific Endeavors
Reading Habits: Personal Literary Journeys and Evolving Publishing Trends
Sustainable Living: Personal Practices and Global Environmental Policies
The Evolution of Gaming: Personal Experiences and Technological Advances
Historical Events: Personal Family Stories and Their Place in World History
The Influence of Cinema: Personal Impressions and Film Industry Changes
Entrepreneurship: Personal Business Ventures and Economic Theories
Spirituality and Religion: Personal Beliefs and Cultural Practices

Simple Outline Template for Writing a 5-Paragraph Braided Essay (Structure of 3 Threads)

I. Introduction

Introduce a central theme or question of a braided essay.
Briefly present the three threads (narratives or ideas) that will be braided for writing your paper.
Thesis statement: Summarize the main point or insight that emerges from intertwining these threads.

II. Body Paragraph 1: Introduction of Thread A

Introduce the first narrative or idea (Thread A).
Provide background information or context.
Explain how Thread A relates to a central theme.

III. Body Paragraph 2: Introduction and Weaving of Thread B

Introduce the second narrative or idea (Thread B).
Weave Thread B with aspects of Thread A introduced previously.
Highlight connections or contrasts between Threads A and B.

IV. Body Paragraph 3: Introduction and Weaving of Thread C

Introduce the third narrative or idea (Thread C).
Weave Thread C with aspects of Threads A and B.
Emphasize how Thread C adds meaning and depth or a new perspective to a braided narrative.

V. Conclusion

Provide a summary of how the three strands are interwoven and what this new perspective reveals about a central theme.
Reiterate the thesis in the light of the three braided narratives.
Offer final reflections or implications of the insights gained from the essay.

Note: You can add or remove body paragraphs depending on the number of strands. However, the logic of a braided essay must be followed for 2 or more threads. The structure will depend on the number of critical points between 2 or more threads. Hence, there can be more than 2 paragraphs in each body section of a braided essay.

Braided Essay Example

Topic: The Evolution of Communication (Critical Point): Traditional Letters, Telephony, and Digital Media (3 Threads)

I. Sample Introduction of a Braided Essay

The evolution and development of communication is a historical reflection of human intelligence and societal progress. In this case, it is fantastic to see how far people have come from the simple act of writing handwritten letters to the introduction of the Internet. With each mode of communication, they see how different changes happen in all aspects of their lives. In particular, traditional letters, telephony, and digital media reflect speed, style, and societal changes, which is evidence of human progress.

II. Body Paragraph Example 1: The Era of Letters

In the era of letters, communication was a deliberate, reflective process. Handwritten letters, crafted with care, were imbued with personal touch and emotional depth. This mode of communication shaped a sense of intimacy and patience between a sender and a recipient, as people wrote their thoughts and feelings in physical papers, often waiting days or weeks for a response. As a result, the physical features of letters, with individualized handwriting and paper, created a personal connection between many people who could not meet together due to long distances but wanted to share their feelings and thoughts.

III. Body Paragraph Example 2: Emergence and Impact of Telephony

The invention and mass introduction of telephony as a communicational technology marked a significant shift in the human world. With the telephone, conversations that once took weeks for letters could occur in real-time, bridging distances with the sound of a human voice. Basically, this revolution in communication changed not just how people communicated but also social dynamics. Telephone conversations offered a new form of connection, one that was more direct and personal than letters, but it lacked their intimacy and patience nature. In turn, this era of telephones saw the beginning of the transformation of communication from writing letters to private conversations.

IV. Body Paragraph Example 3: The Digital Media Age

Nowadays, with the help of the Internet, digital media has taken a dominant position in all human societies, and it is characterized by its speed, diversity, and popularity. For example, emails, social media, and instant messaging via smartphones have changed people’s interactions, allowing global connectivity in one second. Moreover, digital communication has a universal format because it supports text, audio, and video channels, improving the ways in which people connect. In this case, digital media has become a modern form of communication among its users, and it has replaced traditional letters and telephones in full. Hence, even if people are far away from each other, they can write letters or call their family members, friends, colleagues, or anyone they want.

V. Sample Conclusion of a Braided Essay

The historical evolution from letters to digital media is real evidence of a dramatic shift in communication styles and human interactions that people have today. While letters suggested depth and emotional connection between senders and recipients, telephony allowed them to hear each other irrespective of distance. Furthermore, digital media helps people connect with each other anywhere in the world. In turn, each stage in the evolution of communication reflects changes in trends, values, and technologies. As a result, a better understanding of this evolution can provide new ideas into not just how people communicate but also the changing nature of social interactions and human relationships.

20 Tips for Writing a Braided Essay

When writing a braided essay, it is essential to intertwine different narratives harmoniously. In this case, selecting correct strands that are distinctive and share a thematic connection at the same time allows writers to connect and contrast each other meaningfully. Hence, you should think about these 10 dos and 10 don’ts when writing your braided essay.

10 Dos for Writing a Braided Essay to Consider:

Choose Complementary Strands
Maintain Clarity in Each Strand
Use Smooth Transitions Between Threads
Balance Strands in a braided essay
Highlight Connections and Contrasts
Write About Varied Critical Points
Keep Your Audience in Mind
Reflect on a Bigger Picture
Revise for Cohesion
Experiment With Structure
Overcomplicating Strands
Neglecting Transitions
Losing a Focus on a Central Theme
Using Unrelated Strands
Disregarding the Purpose of Each Strand
Missing a Balance Between Strands
Providing Non-Connected Critical Points
Repeating the Information in a braided essay
Forgetting to Proofread
Ignoring a Braided Narrative Structure

Summing Up on How to Write a Good Braided Essay

Select Interconnected Strands: Choose narrative threads that are distinct yet thematically linked, allowing for writing a rich and meaningful braided essay.
Develop Each Strand Fully: Focus on each narrative with enough detail and depth, ensuring that each thread stands strong on its own while contributing to the overall theme of a paper.
Provide Smooth Transitions: Seamlessly intertwine your narratives, using thoughtful transitions to maintain the logical order of ideas and coherence of the overall essay.
Maintain a Balanced Approach: Give equal weight to each narrative strand, avoiding the dominance of one strand over others.
Highlight Connections and Contrasts: Use connections of different narratives to draw out and emphasize both the similarities and the differences, enriching the reader’s understanding.
Engage Readers Emotionally and Intellectually: Strive to connect with your readers on both an emotional and intellectual level, making your braided essay writing both thought-provoking and relatable.
Keep a Central Theme in Your Focus: Ensure that all narrative strands correspond to each other and explore a central theme of your paper.
Revise for Cohesion and Clarity: Use your time to revise your essay, focusing on improving its coherence, unity, and clarity.
Incorporate Personal and Analytical Elements: Blend personal narratives with analytical insights or research, suggesting a well-detailed argument or story.
End With a Reflective Conclusion: Conclude by connecting together various strands, offering a final synthesis that covers a central theme and leaves a lasting impact on readers.

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How to write a braided essay, saturday, january 13, 2018 • writing tips.

What is a Braided Essay?

A braided essay is an essay that uses 2-3 events or topics to create an essay surrounding an event or question. Writers “weave” the “strands” (events or topics) together to form a “braid.” Sometimes when you say that out loud to yourself, it makes no sense. Therefore, let’s look at Joann Beard’s “ The Fourth State of Matter. ” Beard’s main strand is her narrative about taking care of her sick collie that is dying. Her first strand is dealing with the squirrels in her spare bedroom and the breakdown of her marriage. The last strand is the Iowa University Physics department shooting. These events are woven together to create one essay about an author’s inability to control the events happening in her life. Braided essays can have more or less than three “strands.” Essays have been known to have just two strands or four to five. The most important thing to note about braided essays is repetition of the braid “strands.” The repetition of these elements are what makes an essay braided rather than just a collage. If you place multiple fragmented events and don’t repeat them, you are making a collage, not a braided essay.

How to Construct a Braided Essay

The worksheet is pretty straightforward and basic. It by no means encompasses what your braided essay can be, but I thought it would be easier to go over a simple braid.

First you will chose the anchor of your essay, otherwise known as the main strand or core event. This can also be a theme if you’re exploring different facets of something. In Beard, her main core event is taking care of her collie. (You can also say it’s the shooting, I believe it’s open to interpretation, but either way this method works no matter what you choose as the core). With this core event, Beard weaves two other strands. The first other strand is the Beard’s failing marriage and the squirrels infesting her guest bedroom. This event ties in the collie because it is another thing Beard doesn’t have control over and can’t deal with on her own. You will need to choose another event that makes sense when related to your core event. Pick a longer scene or topic in order to continue the repetition pattern that has to happen. After choosing two events, you will need to pick one more to round out your essay and complete the braid. It doesn’t have to relate to the first other strand you chose, but needs to relate to the core event somehow. In “The Fourth State of Matter,” Beard talks about the Iowa University Physics Department shooting. This relates to the collie because Beard discusses the collie with her coworkers, but also later because of Beard not being able to save her coworkers and their own death she has to deal with. Again, the key here is the repetition. Beard is constantly weaving these events in her essay to create the braid. You must do this too, to create a proper braided essay.

More Inspiration and Examples

If writing braided essays intrigues you, or you enjoy reading the format, I have a few sources of inspiration to share with you. Along with Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter,” other braided essays include Biondolillo’s “ How to Skin a Bird ” and Redsand’s “ A Good Stranger .” Biondolilo’s “How to Skin a Bird” is a more fragmented version of a braided essay and discusses the author’s relationship with her daughter while instructing on how to skin a bird properly. Redsand’s “A Good Stranger” discusses the author’s religious identity, braiding Christianity, Judaism, and Navajo tradition. “A Good Stranger” is an outstanding example if you are looking to write on a theme rather than focus on a certain event. You can also find more information and other works to read on this website .

Finding Your Footing: Sub-genres in Creative Nonfiction

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Memoir is perhaps the “flagship” of creative nonfiction, the sub-genre most familiar to those outside of literary and academic circles. Most human beings lead interesting lives filled with struggle, conflict, drama, decisions, turning points, etc.; but not all of these stories translate into successful memoir. The success of the memoir depends on the writer’s ability to sequence events, to tell a story, and to describe characters in believable ways, among other things. Writer Carol Spindel reminds us that in the mid-2000s a scandal surrounding writer James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces erupted after he was forced to admit that large sections of his “memoir” were “fictionalized:” he’d embellished, made things up. A memoir that strays from the truth is not far removed from lying, because regardless of the writer’s intention, the story deceives the reader. Spindel writes that, unlike in novels, “The knowledge expressed in the memoir has the legitimacy acquired through first-hand experience.” Good memoir also provides reflection on the events that have happened to the writer, so it “can give readers insights into society, and even into the larger meaning of life itself” (Spindel).

The Braided Essay

The braided essay is a good tool for introducing writers—especially student writers—to the CNF genre. In a braided essay, the writer has multiple “threads” or “through-lines” of material, each on a different subject. The essay is broken into sections using medial white space, lines of white space on a page where there are no words (much like stanzas in poetry), and each time there is a section break, the writer moves from one “thread” to another. Braided essays take their name from this alternating of storylines, as well as from the threads the story contains; there are usually three, though to have four or two is also possible. Though there is not a strict formula for success, the form usually contains at least one thread that is very personal and based on memory, and at least one thread that is heavily researched. Often, the threads seem very disparate at first, but by the climax of the essay, the threads being to blend together; connections are revealed.

Topical Writing

Perhaps the genre closest to an essay or a blog post, topical writing is an author’s take on a given topic of specific interest to the reader. For example, nature writing and travel writing have been popular for centuries, while food writing is gathering steam via cooking blogs. Nature writing involves exploring the writer’s experience in a beautiful and thoroughly rendered natural setting, such as a cabin on a mountaintop. Travel Writing, as the name implies, details the writer’s experiences while traveling, whether by choice on a vacation or out of necessity due to business or serving in the military. Finally, contemporary food writing explores the writer’s connection to cooking and enjoying food of any variety. All three will occasionally step into the writer’s personal experiences via memories, but these episodes are always related to the topic driving the essay.

Whatever form a creative nonfiction piece takes, it must remain based in the author’s actual lived experiences and perceptions. Like academic writing, the piece must be accurately researched and the sources must be documented. Finally, the author must also always leave room to reflect on how their experiences have shaped them into the person they are now. It’s the reflection that makes the reader feel satisfied: it offers something to the reader that they can carry with them, a way of seeing the world.

Works Cited

Cokinos, Christopher. “Organized Curiosity: Creative Writers and the Research Life.” Writer’s Chronicle 42.7: April/May 2015. 92-104. Print.

Ironman, Sean. “Writing the Z-Axis: Reflection in the Nonfiction Workshop.” Writer’s

Chronicle 47.1: September 2014. 42-49. Print.

Spindel, Carol. "When Ambiguity Becomes Deception: The Ethics of Memoir." Writer's

Chronicle (2007): n. pag. AWP . Association of Writing Programs, 1 Dec. 2007. Web. 13

Sept. 2015.

Terrill, Richard. "Creative Nonfiction and Poetry." Writer's Chronicle (2004): n. pag. AWP .

Association of Writing Programs, Oct.-Nov. 2004. Web. 3 Oct. 2015.

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Writing the Braided Essay

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In her Creative Nonfiction essay “The Braided Essay as Social Justice,” Nicole Walker argues: “The braided essay isn’t a new form. In fact, I think nearly every essay uses a kind of braiding…perhaps,” she continues, “the braided form is most effective when the political and the personal are trying to explain and understand each other. 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. 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?

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Amanda Parrish Morgan is the author of Stroller (Bloomsbury) which The New Yorker named one of the best books of 2022, noting that “the central strength of the book is not comprehensiveness but the way the stroller, and Morgan’s experience of her own strollering years, become an omnidirectional magnet, pulling disparate material into friendly proximity.”

Some of Amanda’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Wired, The Rumpus, LitHub, Guernica, The Millions, n+1, The American Scholar, The Washington Post and elsewhere.

Amanda lives in Connecticut with her husband and two kids where she teaches at Fairfield University, The University of Chicago’s Graham School , and the Westport Writers’ Workshop .

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Braiding: Using and Understanding Complexity in Creative Nonfiction

This critical thesis examines the structure of braiding and how two authors use it to depict complex topics: BK Loren in her essay “The Evolution of Hunger” and Rebecca Solnit in her book The Faraway Nearby. The structure for a braided essay includes three types of strands: the research line, the narrative through line, and the past-tense strand. This thesis probes techniques to braid themes, such as direct statements, using related scenes and terms, theme variations, and other types of intertwining. Techniques for guiding the reader through complexity are analyzed, such as how Loren connects strand types and how they both use clear first sentences. Finally, it also shows how the authors use braiding to explore complex feelings about family members.

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Applying a stylistic analysis on certain texts refers to the identification of patterns of usage in writing. However, such an analysis is not restricted just to the description of the formal characteristics of texts, but it also tries to elucidate their functional importance for the interpretation of the text. This paper highlights complexity as a hallmark of a stylistic analysis in "A Rose for Emily", a short story by William Faulkner (1897-1962). The analysis is done by adopting Halliday's (1985) approach to analyzing complexity in sentence structure; and Lauer, et al. (2008) approach to analyzing narrative from a macro perspective in relation to the story acts. The analysis rests upon the assumption that since form conveys meaning, Faulkner's multilayer usage of complexity is extremely functional. This paper tries also to detect and prove that stylistic complexity is manipulated to convey the main themes, events, and successfully lead to identify the distinctive structure of this story.

Zainub Verjee

This brief essay explores the idea of narrative in three separate works: Where are you? (2005) by Luc Courchesne, The Paradise Institute (2001) by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller and The Crossing Project (2001) by Ranjit Makkuni in order to explore to grapple with philosopher Strawson's1 key idea that understanding narrative hinges on the opposition between diachronic (continuous, or narrative) and episodic (discontinuous, or non-narrative) perceptions of life/reality;and hence ,these artworks are about how we understand and perceive ourselves.

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Learning and Writing Goals

Learning goals.

In this workshop, you will study the braided essay through creative and craft work while generating drafts of new material toward your own braided essay. The class will delve into the practices of memoir, immersion research, and cultural criticism, as well as how to “do the braid”—that is, how to compose, edit, and organize material that can become unwieldy in draft form.

You will learn practical techniques (like how to use index cards and your wall or floor to visually represent ideas and structures, and how to use the sonic rhythms of poetry to link disparate chunks of text), and you will learn a series of empowerment exercises that you can return to when you find your voice stuck in your throat.

By the end of the class, you’ll learn how to deploy personal narrative and different styles of outward-looking writing to link seemingly unrelated ideas, and you’ll realize and capitalize on the textual currency embedded in your own memories, experiences, and curiosities. You’ll learn to read as a writer and write as an editor, homing your eye toward connections of ideas and language.

Writing Goals

You will leave the class with a first draft of a braided essay and revision plan to guide you toward its completion.

Zoom Schedule

90 minute Zoom meetings will take place each Tuesday beginning June 11, at 6:00pm Pacific/9:00 Eastern.

Weekly Syllabus

Week one: introductions and overview.

Introductions
Craft talk on the braided essay, overview of 3 parts we’re looking at, etc
Intro Morning Pages
Method exercise
Readings: Biondolillo, Conover
Homework: daily pages toward essay ideas

WEEK TWO: LOOKING INWARD: MEMOIR AND PERSONAL NARRATIVE

Craft talk on memoir
Discussion: aspects of memoir
Method exercise: Shifting Voices
Drafting plans
Reading: Dombek, Yuknavitch
Homework: memoir pages

WEEK THREE: THE BODY IS THE TOOL: EXPERIENTIAL AND IMMERSION RESEARCH

Craft talk on experiential and immersion research
Generate experiential or immersion plans and/or freewrite pages
First/second/third exercise
Reading: Abdurraqib, Biss
Homework: experiential/immersion research and pages

WEEK FOUR: LOOKING OUTWARD: CULTURAL CRITICISM AND SECONDARY RESEARCH

Reader response to experiential/immersion pages
Craft talk on cultural criticism/secondary research
Discussion: Research method
Authority of voice exercise
Reading: Febos
Homework: cultural crit/secondary research pages

WEEK FIVE: FILLING IN THE GAPS: LEARNING TO SEE WHAT YOUR DRAFT NEEDS

Craft talk on seeing the big picture and filling in the gaps
Reverse outline exercise
Reading as a writer exercise
Reading: McPhee, Tufte
Homework: reverse outline, edit plan, and work on edits/expansion

WEEK SIX: STRUCTURING, EDITING, AND REVISIONS: BRINGING SHAPE AND PRECISION TO YOUR PAGES

Reader response to cultural crit/secondary research pages
Craft talk on structuring, editing, and revisions
Discussion: structural modes and logics
Exercise: Unmixing metaphors + applying pressure to language
Reading: Chavez, Session Iworkshop drafts
Homework: edits, Session I writers submit drafts

WEEK SEVEN: WORKSHOP I

The Critical Response Method
Workshop Session I
Reading: Session II workshop drafts
Homework: Session II writers submit drafts

WEEK EIGHT: WORKSHOP II

Workshop Session II

Student Feedback for Margo Steines:

Margo writes with insight and incisiveness you feel in your gut. Reading her work reminds me that I am human and alive and not alone in feeling what I feel. It's a privilege to read Margo and also to be edited by her. She's a thoughtful editor who possesses both empathy and sharp instincts, which do not always appear in the same package. She knows how to ask you thought-provoking questions about your work that lead you to your own solutions. Rachel Reeves, journalist

“Margo’s course was a joy. Her knowledge, experience, and empathy created a safe space for discussing sensitive subjects, and left me not only more confident in my writing about challenging subjects but with broader insights into life as a whole. You can’t ask for more than that.” —James Boud

About Margo Steines

Margo Steines is a native New Yorker, a journeyman ironworker, and serves as mom to a wildly spirited small person.

Margo holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and lives and writes in Tucson. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger: Essays to the Ones Who Haunt Us , and elsewhere. She is the author of the memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story .

Margo is faculty at the University of Arizona Writing Program and is also a private creative coach and creative writing class facilitator. You can read more about her practices at margosteines.com.

Margo's Courses

Writing the Body: A Nonfiction Craft Seminar Secrets & Confessions: Writing Deeply Personal Nonfiction Writing the Memoir-in-Essays *Private Class | Finding Confidence in the Braided Essay: A Craft and Empowerment Workshop for Literary Nonfiction Writing Chronic Illness Finding Confidence in the Braided Essay: A Craft and Empowerment Workshop for Literary Nonfiction

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Classes You're Interested In

Rebirth. Sandra Shugart. The Eckleburg Gallery. 2013.

Lesson No. 2: The Braided Essay

“Picturing the Personal Essay” by Tim Bascom
“The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard
“Prelude: The Box” by Eula Biss

In his visual craft Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay “Picturing the Personal Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >Essay ,” Tim Bascom shows the various way a piece of writing can be organized in order to create a structure that heightens the overall narrative . He describes how writing can veer off into directions different from the writer’s initial intentions. Neat, huh? Because here we are with this perfectly structured and well-organized Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay stewing in our heads, and then when we go to write it down it looks like a sprawling maze that doesn’t lead anywhere—at least not where we thought it would lead. This experience can lead to confusing thoughts of what, exactly, we’re trying to say. But it can also lead to something greater and more complex than our original idea.

Key thing to remember: we might not know what we’re trying to say.

And that’s okay. Go with the sprawling and see where it goes. One way to bring the endless maze into focus is to look at the main themes and/or narratives you have started to discuss in this Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay zygote. Though something you will most likely start to see as you look at all of these disorganized elements is that there are some main strands of ideas running through the mess. What to do next? Enter: the braid.

The structure of a braided Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay is pretty basic: take at least three different narratives , break them up into different segments, and then organizing them by mixing them together. While basic, this type of Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay isn’t necessarily an easy one to write. How can you get seemingly unrelated narratives to speak to one another?

The key points to a braided Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay are an overarching theme and juxtaposition. The success of the braided Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay is dependent on how you use these elements in order to make three different narratives speak to one another. So get ready for some free-association. Think of it this way: you might not know what you want to say, but you can look at what you have already written or the different experiences you have/want to write about and see if there are any connecting images, words, phrases, ideas or even loosely-related events that can get these segments to speak to one another. You might have to tinker with the segments to get them into a dialogue . You might have to leave some segments out. Regardless of what you do or do not include, look at each segment as a separate entity, but also as part of a whole. Because this is what a braided Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay is: disjointed thoughts juxtaposed in such a way as to create a connected narrative , a larger meaning.

What are the three strands of Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter”? In what ways do they carry equal weight? In what ways do they not? And what do you think is the theme that connects these three topics together?
The execution scene in Beard’s Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay brings a type of disruption not just to the narrative , but to how that narrative is told through braiding together three Plot A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plot is a series of events deliberately arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. A story gives us only "what happened next," whereas plot's concern is "what, how, and why," with scenes ordered to highlight the workings of cause and effect... E. M. Forster distinguishes between plot and story by describing story as: the chopped off length of the tape worm of time... a narrative of(...) Term details " >story lines. In what ways does Beard begin to braid again, and how is this different from how she braided the strands before the execution scene ?
In “Prelude: The Box,” Eula Biss brings small segments from three different types of narratives into conversation with each other: quotes from family members, Biss’s own thoughts /reflections, an airplane’s black box. What theme(s) do you think bring these strands together? How do the narratives build on one another in order to fully examine the theme(s)?
What are some of the moments in Biss’s Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay in which you think the segments most affectively speak to one another?

Writing Exercises

Blindly flip through the dictionary and put your finger down three different times. Take the three words your finger landed on and write about what color has to do with each of them.
Make a list of 5 objects you can see from where you are sitting right now. Cover that up and make a list of 5 different physical actions you have done so far today (walking, sitting, writing, etc.). Look at the lists, and write about each noun using at least one of the verbs you wrote down. Once you have a few sentences per noun, write a paragraph or sentence in between each segment that helps to connect them thematically or visually.
Print out THIS document of Opening The opening of any work should immediately immerse the reader into the narrative. An opening might focus primarily on character(s) and/or setting. Regardless of focus, there is a general rule of thumb when writing effective openings—in medias res—or to put it another way, just throw us right into the middle of things and give us strategic, concrete details. Below are two narrative structures. The first more applicable to longer forms, the second from Burroway's Writing Fiction: A Guide to(...) Term details " >opening paragraphs of famous novels and cut it up so that each paragraph is on its own slip of paper. Now take the paragraph bits and organize them in a way that makes sense to you.

Weekly Deadlines

All readings are to be completed
At least one discussion response is to be posted to the FORUM below .
Weekly draft of Essay A moderately brief prose discussion of a restricted topic. A basic and very useful division can, however, be made: formal and informal. Informal Essay: Includes aphoristic essays such as Bacon's Periodical Essays.... Qualities that make an essay informal include: the personal element, humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty, freedom from stiffness and affectation, incomplete or tentative treatment of topic. Formal Essay: Qualities include serious purpose,(...) Term details " >essay (s) (no more than 1000 words total) is to be posted to the FORUM below .
Chelsey will respond with feedback

[bbp-single-forum id=28009]

Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide

A design professor from Denmark once drew for me a picture of the creative process, which had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation. “Here,” he said. “This is what it looks like”:

Nothing is wasted though, said the design professor, because every bend in the process is helping you to arrive at your necessary structure. By trying a different angle or creating a composite of past approaches, you get closer and closer to what you intend. You begin to delineate the organic form that will match your content.

The remarkable thing about personal essays, which openly mimic this exploratory process, is that they can be so quirky in their “shape.” No diagram matches the exact form that evolves, and that is because the best essayists resist predictable approaches. They refuse to limit themselves to generic forms, which, like mannequins, can be tricked out in personal clothing. Nevertheless, recognizing a few basic underlying structures may help an essay writer invent a more personal, more unique form. Here, then, are several main options.

Narrative with a lift

Take, for example, Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter.” The narrator, abandoned by her husband, is caring for a dying dog and going to work at a university office to which an angry graduate student has brought a gun. The sequence of scenes matches roughly the unfolding of real events, but there is suspense to pull us along, represented by questions we want answered. In fact, within Beard’s narrative, two sets of questions, correlating to parallel subplots, create a kind of double tension. When the setting is Beard’s house, we wonder, “Will she find a way to let go of the dying dog, not to mention her failing marriage?” And when she’s at work, we find ourselves asking, “What about the guy with the gun? How will he impact her one ‘safe place’?”

One interesting side note: trauma, which is a common source for personal essays, can easily cause an author to get stuck on the sort of plateau Kittredge described. Jo Ann Beard, while clearly wrestling with the immobilizing impact of her own trauma, found a way to keep the reader moving both forward and upward, until the rising tension reached its inevitable climax: the graduate student firing his gun. I have seen less-experienced writers who, by contrast, seem almost to jog in place emotionally, clutching at a kind of post-traumatic scar tissue.

The whorl of reflection

Let’s set aside narrative, though, since it is not the only mode for a personal essay. In fact, most essays are more topical or reflective, which means they don’t move through time in a linear fashion as short stories do.

One of the benefits of such a circling approach is that it seems more organic, just like the mind’s creative process. It also allows for a wider variety of perspectives—illuminating the subject from multiple angles. A classic example would be “Under the Influence,” Scott Russell Sanders’s essay about his alcoholic father. Instead of luring us up the chronological slope of plot, Sanders spirals around his father’s drinking, leading us to a wide range of realizations about alcoholism: how it gets portrayed in films, how it compares to demon-possession in the Bible, how it results in violence in other families, how it raises the author’s need for control, and even how it influences the next generation through his workaholic over-compensation. We don’t read an essay like this out of plot-driven suspense so much as for the pleasure of being surprised, again and again, by new perspective and new insight.

The formal limits of focus

My own theory is that most personal essayists, because of a natural ability to extrapolate, do not struggle to find subjects to write about. Writer’s block is not their problem since their minds overflow with remembered experiences and related ideas. While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite, deleting and deleting. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. The essay is a figure locked in a too-large-lump of personal experience, and the good essayist chisels away all unnecessary material.

Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting” is an odd but useful model. She limits that essay to a single evening walk in London, ostensibly taken to buy a pencil. I suspect Woolf gave herself permission to combine incidents from several walks in London, but no matter. The essay feels “brought together” by the imposed limits of time and place.

As it happens, “Street Haunting” is also an interesting prototype for a kind of essay quite popular today: the segmented essay. Although the work is unified by the frame of a single evening stroll, it can also be seen as a combination of many individual framed moments. If we remove the purpose of the journey—to find a pencil—the essay falls neatly into a set of discrete scenes with related reveries: a daydreaming lady witnessed through a window, a dwarfish woman trying on shoes, an imagined gathering of royalty on the other side of a palace wall, and eventually the arguing of a married couple in the shop where Woolf finally gets her pencil.

Dipping into the well

Our attention to thematic unity brings up one more important dynamic in most personal essays. Not only do we have a horizontal movement through time, but there is also a vertical descent into meaning. As a result, essayists will often pause the forward motion to dip into a thematic well.

In fact, Berry uses several of these loops of reflective commentary, and though they seem to be digressions, temporarily pulling the reader away from the forward flow of the plot, they develop an essential second layer to the essay.

Braided and layered structures

Want an example? Look at Judith Kitchen’s three-page essay “Culloden,” which manages to leap back and forth quite rapidly, from a rain-pelted moor in 18th-century Scotland to 19th-century farms in America to the blasted ruins of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, the author’s birthday. The sentences themselves suggest the impressionistic effect that Kitchen is after, being compressed to fragments, rid of the excess verbiage we expect in formal discourse: “Late afternoon. The sky hunkers down, presses, like a lover, against the land. Small sounds. A far sheep, faint barking. . . .” And as the images accumulate, layer upon layer, we begin to feel the author’s fundamental mood, a painful awareness of her own inescapable mortality. We begin to encounter the piece on a visceral level that is more intuitive than rational. Like a poem, in prose.

Coming Full Circle

First of all, endings are related to beginnings. That’s why many essays seem to circle back to where they began. Annie Dillard, in her widely anthologized piece “Living Like Weasels,” opens with a dried-out weasel skull that is attached, like a pendant, to the throat of a living eagle—macabre proof that the weasel was carried aloft to die and be torn apart. Then, at the end of the essay, Dillard alludes to the skull again, stating, “I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.”

See how deftly Dillard accomplishes this effect simply by positing one last imagined or theoretical possibility—a way of life she hopes to master, that we ourselves might master: “Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.” Yes, the essay has come full circle, echoing the opening image of the weasel’s skull, but it also points away, beyond itself, to something yet to be realized. The ending both closes and opens at the same time.

All diagrams rendered by Claire Bascom. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Volume I, issue 1 of The Essay Review .

This essay is fabulously This essay is fabulously useful! I’ll be showing it to my creative writing students semester after semester, I’m sure. I appreciate the piece’s clarity and use of perfect examples.

I love the succinct diagrams and cited writing examples. Very instructive and useful as A.P. comments above. I also loved that I had read the Woolf journey to buy a pencil–one of my favorite essays because it is such a familiar experience–that of observing people.

Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay”

A personal essay of the Steven Hotdog form needs the interior experience, the exterior fact, and the meaning that connects them—in order to work its magic.

When I first heard the term “braided essay,” a form of creative nonfiction that interweaves multiple storylines or topics, I felt an immediate spark of recognition—and an equal one of embarrassment.

Like many people without formal training who stumble into a pursuit for which training very much exists, I had been assembling obvious, time-tested concepts about writing from scratch. In this case, I’d been going around for at least a year touting the benefits of an interlocking three-part personal essay structure, as if I’d invented the idea. But of course I hadn’t invented the idea! Of course it had a name, and a history, and a set of best practices! I’d stumbled into using the format, despite my inexperience, specifically because it was such an obvious, natural move: a sort of controlled juggle, over-under-over, weaving parts together so that each strand touches each, securing them into a stable, structured pattern. When I read an essay with this structure—say, Elissa Washuta’s intricate, staccato “ Apocalypse Logic ,” or the chunkier farm-girl braid of Helen Rosner’s “ Christ in the Garden of Endless Breadsticks ”—it felt like having an epiphany: of course, of course . By the same token, I wrote with this structure not because I had any grounding in nonfiction technique, but because I wanted to tee up those epiphanies for my readers, to draw disparate elements together and show them slotting into place.

If I’d known anything, I would have been able to track the term “braided essay” back to the creative writing resource Tell It Slant , written by Brenda Miller and Susanne Paola Antonetta in 2003, the definitive text on structuring nonfiction work. (The actual technique probably goes back further—I can’t be the only person who discovered it independently—but this was its formal debut.) In the book, Miller describes introducing the structure to her students by bringing to class a loaf of challah, three hanks of dough snugly interwoven. But, with apologies to the person who really did invent (or at least name) the braided essay, this doesn’t strike me as a very good metaphor. A challah is homogeneous, the same across strands and within them. It’s challah all the way down. That may express the aesthetic form of a braided essay, but it doesn’t actually get at why this format is effective, or how to use it most effectively. For that, we need something more savory, more piquant. Meatier. We need, perhaps, a hot dog.

Let me back up. In November 2020, although it feels much longer ago to me, the writer Jake Wolff—who is a creative writing professor and an excellent essayist in his own right—drove the literary nonfiction corner of Twitter into a small mania with the following observation :

Creative nonfiction writers be like:

I first ate a hotdog when I was six years old. I remember the taste, the scent, the summer.

SECTION BREAK

Hot dogs were invented in 1693 by Steven Hotdog. According to Scientific American, the hotdog is

As of this writing, the tweet has 300-odd replies, most of which are some variation on “I feel attacked,” and 1500-ish quote tweets, ditto. I felt attacked too, needless to say. Steven Hotdog is coming for us all! But beneath the surface of this weenie roast, I think, is a really profound commentary on why we feel so personally implicated—which is to say, why we all keep doing this move in essay writing. What’s Steven Hotdog to me, or I to Steven Hotdog, that I should weep for him?

Like a Chicago-style hot dog, which famously can not be served with ketchup (yes, I looked up some styles of hot dog, leave me alone), what’s significant about the Steven Hotdog tweet is not only what it includes but what it omits. It gestures toward a braided structure, with two ideas set in parallel, but it’s missing the third. I think part of the reason the tweet feels so incriminating is that for writers or even readers of personal essays, that absence is loud . It resonates. The elision highlights the alchemy of metaphor; we can’t help but imagine a third part, born of the relationship between strand one (the writer’s hot dog memories) and strand two (the history of hot dogs). It’s this final strand, the synthesis, that will give the work its shape.

The tension of the tweet comes from not knowing yet what that synthesis will be. (And probably, at least a little, from knowing how easy it is to construct an essay that simply juxtaposes its elements, without explicitly exploring the relationship between them! There but for the grace of Steven Hotdog go we.) The reader stands, at the end of this tweet, at a pivotal moment: Will the writer leave these strands to lie flaccidly side by side? And if not, which way will the waveform collapse? We are waiting to find out which theme of hot dogs—Their ubiquity at sporting events? Their endless regional variations? Their immortalization in the form of a novelty car?—the third strand will emphasize, establishing the relationship between inner and outer history and bringing the essay home.

You don’t need to have exactly three elements in a braided personal essay, of course—whether you’re making challah or writing, there are all kinds of complicated braids. But, to move rather abruptly from food to geometry, just as three points define a plane, three elements define the field of an essay. When we read the Steven Hotdog tweet, we see the two points defining a line between the writer’s experience (hot dog memories) and factual research (hot dog history). But we also, consciously or not, see the infinity of possible planes including that line, and the way that a third point would collapse all those possibilities into one relationship, one interdependent structure. In that moment before the third nail goes in, we know that these two strands relate , but we don’t know what they mean . Meaning is defined by at least three points: the personal, the factual, and the resonance between them.

What does the rest of this essay look like? Perhaps we’ll see Steven Hotdog, in his seventeenth-century breeches, discovering that a hodgepodge of cast-off meat bits can become something greater than the sum of its parts; perhaps, in that case, we’ll also see the writer’s childhood memories through this lens, focusing on their outcast identity and how they found a community where they made sense. Or maybe the third strand is the idea of authenticity, and we’ll trace the history of the hot dog from Steven’s honest homemade kitchen to its current status as überprocessed semi-food, while the writer also grapples with their growing sense that no experience has ever been as pure and unmediated as that first taste of hot dog at six years old. Or it’s a meditation on maturity, and we trace its evolution from a humble sausage to the wide world of chili dogs and pigs in blankets, while the writer also grapples with the lost simplicity of that six-year-old summer, now hopelessly buried in the complexity of adulthood. An aged man is but a paltry thing, a hotted dog upon a stick.

These are oversimplifications, obviously. Not every essay splits cleanly along personal-versus-research lines, and there will often be more than three elements or even possibly fewer. (Though, given that one of the core elements expresses the relationship of the other two, I hasten to emphasize that where there are fewer sets of footprints, that is probably where Steven Hotdog carried you.) And of course, the braid is only one of many possible shapes for an effective essay. But broadly, a personal essay of the Steven Hotdog form needs to cover these elements—interior experience, exterior fact, and the meaning that connects them—in order to work its particular sympathetic magic.

This is why the term “braid”—and especially the challah comparison—feels insufficient for this type of work. A challah is a bread made of three identical breads, fractally bready; the weaving is cosmetic, neither supporting the structure nor altering the taste. A babka might be a little closer to the mark. But really, if you’re going to seek a metaphor to embody this type of writing, you need an image that suggests three distinct and irreducible elements: the meat that gives it a core, the bun that holds it, and the toppings and condiments that define its identity. What other food could it be?

Jess Zimmerman is the author of Women and Other Monsters and an editor at Quirk Books. Her essays and opinion writing have appeared in the Guardian , the New Republic, Slate, Hazlitt, Catapult, and others.

More in this series

Where Christina Tucker Writes

The Impossible Ideals of the “Writer’s Life”

Being a Good Lawyer Can Make You a Bad Writer

The Braided Approach to Memoir

Our lives are made up of many strands—some of experience, some of memory, some of meditation and reflection, some of ongoing action. Those who write memoir must find the appropriate forms for ensuring that the textures of life will have their full expression.

What we know about the braided essay offers us a plan for making sure that we put a fully lived life on the page. Taking our cues from this form can invite us to dramatize important moments from our lives, blend the past with the present and the future, and find a place from which we can reflect, meditate, think, and make meaning.

So here’s a writing activity designed to allow you to wrap past and present through the lens of action and memory, to move from the role of participant to spectator, to project the course of our lives through the present and on into the future.

First, identify a line of action from your past, something that has stayed with you long beyond its resolution in real time. I might, for example, choose the night I stole my father’s car when I was a teenager. Write the first scene of this narrative thread.

Second, find another story line from the present that in some way connects to the one from your past. You don’t need to know how it connects at this point. Trust your instinct. Say to yourself, “When I think of that story from my past, I also think of this story from the present.” Write the first scene of that present-day narrative.

Third, slip into a more reflective mode. Maybe begin with the line, “If I could tell my younger self what I know now, I’d say. . . .” Speak from a wiser perspective. Allow yourself to make meaning from the past experience.

Fourth, attach what you’ve written in the third step to the present-day story line. Maybe begin with the line, “And what would my younger self tell me now? Maybe he or she would tell me to. . . .”

Fifth, continue to wrap steps two and three around the first one until you arrive at a place where you can make some sort of statement about the future. Maybe begin with the line, “I know that tomorrow. . . .”

Once you have a draft, you can decide whether to take liberties with the form of the braid. The purpose of the exercise is to invite past, present, and future onto the page through the discourses of dramatization and reflection. Now that you’ve gathered your material, you can relax the form if you wish or make it even more stringent, depending on how well it serves what you’ve come to the page to think more about.

The strands of our lives are multiple and complex. Our memoirs should formally allow those strands to converse, and by so doing, to make them resonate with us and our readers.

15 Comments

You have no idea how much your post helps me this morning. If only I could get some discipline and WRITE. I have a book inside of me dying to get out. I find some reason to ñot sit and my desk and WRITE. Time’s awasting. I’m not getting any younger. But meantime, I enjoy what others write. Especially your latest book: “Late One Night.” It kept me interested until the very end. Thanks!

I’m so glad to hear that his was helpful to you this morning, Eileen! And thank you so much for the kind words about “Late One Night.”

Brilliance, as usual, without pridefulness–not to overlook the part-the-waters miracle clarity. Wow.

Thanks, Lee.

Thanks, Roy. You have me wondering whether this braided approach works for writing poems–maybe through different images, etc?

Lee, you’re a godsend. I have spent three years on writing scenes for my memoir, only to hit a brick wall when I tried to find the right structure. After being suggested to write a braided narrative, i first tried a frame narrative, couldn’t get it to work for me. When I decided to write a braided narrative, I searched different articles online, and thankfully came across your piece.

Thank you so much for your wealth of knowledge on this subject! Don

You’re very welcome, Don. I’m glad I could be of help. I put a new post up every Monday. You might also be interested in my craft book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life , which will be out October 1, although friends tell me their pre-ordered copies from Amazon.com have already started to arrive. At any rate, thanks so much for visiting my blog and for taking the time to leave this comment. I wish you all the best for your work.

I am glad there is a name for what I have written. Critiques say I should be more chronological. Others like it, but they know me. I don’t know if I CAN rearrange it.

Thanks. I enjoy this and others of your posts.

Thanks for reading my blog and for taking the time to leave a comment. The thing I love about creative nonfiction is the fact that there are so many different approaches–and all of them are valid!

I am stuck on deciding on the right structure. I’m leaning toward braided narratives. Could you possibly shoot some advice? I’ll give you some info on my memoir if you email me. Thank you!

[email protected]

Josh, if you’re interested in braided approaches, find a book called “Writing Creative Nonfiction,” edited by Carolyn Forche and Philip Gerard, and read the piece on braided essays by Brenda Miller. Good luck!

A friend forwarded this to me. Your exercise just produced ideas and an essay outline ready for development. Appreciate the template. I have struggled with how to add complexity to linear pieces: braiding is the answer. Thank you!

Heidi, I’m so glad that my exercise worked for you, and I thank you for taking the time to leave this comment.

This was a very helpful post. I am struggling with structure on a rough draft of my memoir which I feel could benefit from being rearranged into a more present/past/present/past braid. This post gave me an idea of how to go back and examine what I have and rework. Structure is my biggest challenge. Thank you very much.

I’m so glad you found my post helpful. Thank you for reading and for taking the time to leave a comment.

I hadn’t heard of braided memoire writing before this – thanks for explaining, Lee.

btw, I love anything to do with books & would be thrilled if you’d write a guest blog post for my site, which is for anyone who enjoys writing, or books, and all the arts. If you think it might be fun or helpful to have my followers (who total about 10k across my various social media) meet you, here’s the link for general guidelines: https://wp.me/p6OZAy-1eQ

best – da-AL

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The Architects of Hades Strive to Bewitch Gamers Again

Supergiant Games, a small independent studio, had always tackled new projects. Then its dungeon crawler featuring the Greek pantheon became an enormous success.

A bearded man sits in a chair with his hands folded. A bald man stands next to him with his hands on his hips.

By Brian X. Chen

Brian X. Chen, The Times’s personal tech columnist, reported from San Francisco. His favorite weapon in Hades was the rail gun.

When Supergiant Games was wrapping up Hades, a mythologically rich hack-and-slash dungeon crawler it had spent more than three years developing, the studio concluded it was not quite done. The game’s premise of being trapped in hell, which particularly resonated during the pandemic , had opened paths to untold stories about Greek lore.

It needed a sequel.

This was a plot twist for the small independent studio, which had always pursued new ideas — even after its debut game, Bastion, was an immediate hit that ultimately sold millions of copies. Although Hades won numerous industry accolades and prestigious Hugo and Nebula Awards, the decision to make Hades II was a hard one.

“Making a sequel to us, as well, was unexpected,” Greg Kasavin, the creative director of Supergiant, said at the company’s chic studio space in San Francisco ahead of the early access release of Hades II last week.

“We think they’re really quite tough,” he added. “To be able to surprise and delight the audience in the same way is quite a challenge.”

For big-budget triumphs like Mass Effect and Red Dead Redemption, a new installment is an obvious step toward building a lucrative franchise. But although some popular indie games, like Spelunky and Slay the Spire , have pursued sequels, it is a much less frequent route for smaller game makers. Rather than making decisions for shareholders, they often prioritize artists and designers who are eager to express their creativity.

Indie hits also face distinct constraints. They often stand out because of a novel element — like the ability to rewind time in Braid — and that buzz does not always carry into a sequel, said Jesper Juul, an associate professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Architecture, Design and Conservation in Copenhagen.

“The first time people will tweet and post about it and say, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’” said Juul, who wrote a book about independent games . “The second time it doesn’t have that novelty value.”

Supergiant was founded in 2009 by Amir Rao and Gavin Simon, who had worked on the real-time strategy Command & Conquer franchise at Electronic Arts, a giant corporation responsible for franchises such as The Sims and Madden.

Rao and Simon had noticed that several best-selling games, like Plants vs. Zombies and Castle Crashers, were coming from small studios. So they decided to form their own, initially setting up shop at a vacant house owned by Rao’s father in San Jose, Calif. Kasavin, a former video games journalist who also worked at Electronic Arts, joined them.

Kasavin said Supergiant had been tempted to create a sequel after the positive reception of Bastion (2011), in which a child collects powerful shards in a hostile environment that unfolds as a narrator provides commentary. But the team of seven at the time decided to explore other ideas, including science fiction, instead.

That led to Supergiant’s second game, Transistor (2014), about a famous singer who battles robots in a futuristic city. Its third project, the role-playing game Pyre (2017), features a band of exiles seeking freedom from purgatory.

By the time the studio, which now has 25 employees, released an early-access version of Hades in 2018, it had unintentionally created a perception that it was anti-sequel. Yet Supergiant is anything but: Among the games that employees list as their favorites are classic sequels, including Diablo II, Street Fighter II and Warcraft II.

Hades follows the journey of Zagreus, who in some versions of Greek mythology is considered the son of the god of the dead. As he ventures upward through the layers of hell with hopes of visiting his mother on the surface world, Zagreus fights monsters (including his father) with the help of other gods.

The idea of a sequel clicked when Supergiant realized that the god Hades also had daughters. Melinoë, a witch, created the opportunity to dive deep on the connection between Greek mythology and witchcraft.

Hades II has been in the works for more than three years, and not a single member of the team was against pursuing it, Kasavin said.

“We’re too small for that to be an acceptable starting point,” he said. “It’s only going to get tougher from there if you don’t have the raw excitement at the beginning.”

The long development process of Hades underscores one way that games are trying to optimize their odds of success . An incomplete version of the role-playing game Baldur’s Gate 3 was available to players for nearly three years before it was officially released in August to universal acclaim.

The early access version of Hades was made available in December 2018 with the hopes of receiving player input; the game that was officially released in September 2020 was the result of revisions based on thousands of pieces of feedback.

Supergiant is repeating this approach for the sequel. Hades II was released in early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store last week, and the studio said it expected to keep refining it through at least the end of this year.

Rao, who works on the game’s design and mechanics, said player feedback was crucial to the success of Hades. “We will absolutely need that for Hades II,” he said.

In its current state, Hades II is much more polished than the original Hades was at the same point. (A year before Hades was released in early access, it was a game that involved exploring a minotaur’s labyrinth.) But the sequel will still benefit from crowdsourced feedback, Rao said, because it is much larger in scope.

Unlike Zagreus’s singular path in the first Hades, Melinoë will be able to explore two main routes, which essentially makes the sequel at least double the size. Option A is a path down into the underworld to fight Chronos, the god of time, who has usurped her father’s throne. Option B, which opens up later in the game, is a path upward to defend Mount Olympus, the home of the gods, which is under siege by Chronos.

Much of what made the original game addictive remains intact. Hades II is part of the roguelite genre, where players incrementally progress by starting out weak, failing, trying again and applying what they have learned or unlocked to eventually beat the main boss.

To get stronger, Melinoë picks up artifacts known as boons that contain powers shared by gods such as Aphrodite, Hermes and Zeus. The average player will probably die dozens of times before snowballing into an unstoppable force to defeat Chronos.

Sequels can have particular pitfalls. Sitara Shefta, the head of studio at No Brakes Games, said it had been a challenge to expand on Human Fall Flat — a physics-based puzzle game that involves controlling a character named Bob through a dreamy landscape — while preserving what people loved about it.

The original game, by a solo developer, sold 50 million copies. A team of about 35 is working on the sequel, focusing on adding levels and improving the graphics.

“What we don’t want to do is dilute it,” Shefta said. “It’s a physics game where so many people can express themselves in different ways.”

Juul, the video game scholar, said successful independent game makers often faced an innovator’s dilemma. As teams grow larger, he said, they can lose nimbleness and begin playing it safe in response to external demands.

Supergiant said it got no such pressure to make a sequel from partners, including Netflix, which recently published Hades as a mobile game . The studio declined to share sales numbers, saying only that Hades outperformed Bastion, which sold 3 million copies by 2015 .

Days before Supergiant released the early access version of Hades II, a cluster of employees worked in its small studio space, which has an open floor design embellished with orange and crimson accents reminiscent of the original game’s color palette.

The team was eager to reveal how Melinoë’s role as a witch added new dimensions to the gameplay. Zagreus’s punches and sword swings were conducive to rapid button mashing, but Melinoë’s spell-casting staff and other magic weapons require careful timing and precision. With one of her combat moves, she projects a force field that traps surrounding enemies.

Rao said Supergiant would study player feedback through the studio’s Discord channel, web forums, livestreams and social media. The studio also logs some important data — if most players are not picking a certain weapon, for instance, that can serve as a suggestion for designers to make it more fun to use.

The iterative process of learning from mistakes to improve Hades and Hades II is essentially a rogue game in and of itself. Supergiant has been immersed in Greek mythology for nearly seven years, so it is easy for Kasavin to draw a comparison: Sisyphus pushing a boulder for eternity.

Brian X. Chen is the lead consumer technology writer for The Times. He reviews products and writes Tech Fix , a column about the social implications of the tech we use. More about Brian X. Chen

Inside the World of Video Games

What to Play Next?: For inspiration, read what our critics thought about the newest titles , as well as which games our journalists have been enjoying .

A Rooting Interest: Many people can summon memories at the mention of a cherished sports video game. We want to know which one is your favorite .

Eclectic Influences: The mysterious estate in the puzzle game Lorelei and the Laser Eyes has its roots in Resident Evil and the French New Wave.

Building on Success: Hades II pursues a tantalizing past , our critic writes. The small studio behind the game was once considered anti-sequel .

Influencers Dying to Go Viral: The horror video game Content Warning lets players microdose as momentary celebrities on the fictional website SpookTube.

Difficult but Accessible: Games like Another Crab’s Treasure are questioning whether fiendish challenges are an intrinsic feature of the Soulslike genre.

COMMENTS

Braided Essays and How to Write Them
The best way to learn how to write a braided essay is to read one, and to get an idea of what's possible. Next, begin making a list of ideas for your essay. If you're in need of writing prompts, check out our Facebook group! 2. Do a freewrite. Once you've chosen one idea, explore its possibilities by doing a freewrite.
What Is a Braided Essay in Writing?
A braided essay is basically like braided hair in that it weaves multiple threads together to make an essay that works as one cohesive whole. Writers have a few options for pulling off this effect, which can be quite powerful when done successfully. ( How to Create a Narrative Arc for Personal Essays .) For instance, if I wanted to write a ...
How to Write a Braided Essay: Easy Steps & Example
2. Develop Each Strand Individually. Before intertwining strands, develop each thread separately to ensure it is coherent and complete in itself. This aspect involves fleshing out the details, arguments, or stories within each thread, ensuring they are engaging and well-articulated in your braided essay.
How to Write a Braided Essay
A braided essay is an essay that uses 2-3 events or topics to create an essay surrounding an event or question. Writers "weave" the "strands" (events or topics) together to form a "braid.". Sometimes when you say that out loud to yourself, it makes no sense. Therefore, let's look at Joann Beard's " The Fourth State of Matter.
The Braided Essay: What It Is and Why I Used This Writing Structure for
(3 Tips for Writing a Memoir Everyone Wants to Read) For Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory and Family, a food narrative memoir, the structure extends beyond each individual essay in that the collection itself is a braided structure.Each essay has at least two braided highlights—one of my life as the daughter of refugees (from British-occupied east Bengal, now Bangladesh, into ...
Finding Your Footing: Sub-genres in Creative Nonfiction
The braided essay is a good tool for introducing writers—especially student writers—to the CNF genre. In a braided essay, the writer has multiple "threads" or "through-lines" of material, each on a different subject. The essay is broken into sections using medial white space, lines of white space on a page where there are no words ...
Writing the Braided Essay
In her Creative Nonfiction essay "The Braided Essay as Social Justice," Nicole Walker argues: "The braided essay isn't a new form. In fact, I think nearly every essay uses a kind of braiding…perhaps," she continues, "the braided form is most effective when the political and the personal are trying to explain and understand each other.
The Braided Essay as Social Justice Action
Reality is not my strong suit, which is rough for a nonfiction writer. Happily, the braided essay lets me pop in and out of different realities—not so much manipulating the facts as pacing them—and digest reality in drops. • • •. Forces that shape your childhood parallel forces that shape the natural world.
WRIT42602 Writing the Braided Essay
In her Creative Nonfiction essay "The Braided Essay as Social Justice," Nicole Walker argues: "The braided essay isn't a new form. In fact, I think nearly every essay uses a kind of braiding…perhaps," she continues, "the braided form is most effective when the political and the personal are trying to explain and understand each ...
(PDF) Braiding: Using and Understanding Complexity in Creative
The braided essay offers an interesting way to collaborate and respond to young adult literature. Since this essay form is based off the lyric essay, the option of the musical addition through a multimedia product is natural segue. Students can learn to be reflective in transactional ways as they develop their emerging voice in writing.
The Braided Essay
The braided essay is often woven by threads representing the past, present, and future. It occurred to us as we read and studied Heather Swan's poem "Victor" that the present of the poem registered the process of disappearing - how bee populations are declining as a result of toxic pesticides. "Victor" is the brand name of a line of ...
Play with Pattern: Crafting the Braided and Collage Essays
"Play with Pattern," was developed by Joanna Cooper. Joanna Penn Cooper writes and teaches flash memoir, lyric essays, and poetry, and she is the author of The Itinerant Girl's Guide to Self-Hypnosis (Brooklyn Arts Press) and What Is a Domicile (Noctuary Press). Her work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day feature, as well as South Dakota Review, Vinyl, On […]
Braided Essays
The following essays, though longer, provide that true braid where the back and forth phenomenon leads to a new and integrated understanding of the subject. Chelsea Biondolillo's How to Skin a Bird. Nicole Walker's Abundance and Scarcity. Joann Beard's The Fourth State of Matter. Eula Biss's Time and Distance Overcome.
Finding Confidence in the Braided Essay: A Craft and Empowerment
Some of the most successful braided essays utilize multiple modalities of nonfiction writing, from memoir and personal narrative to immersion journalism, cultural criticism, science writing, and academic and literary research, so with the goal of equipping you with as many tools as you need to write your essay with agency and authority, this ...
Lesson No. 2: The Braided Essay • Eckleburg
Lesson No. 2: The Braided Essay. Readings. Discussion. In his visual craft essay "Picturing the Personal Essay ," Tim Bascom shows the various way a piece of writing can be organized in order to create a structure that heightens the overall narrative. He describes how writing can veer off into directions different from the writer's ...
4 Lessons Learned Writing a Braided Narrative
Author Johanna Garton shares four lessons learned writing a braided narrative. Johanna Garton. Apr 2, 2024. A word count representing six weeks of work stared back at me. Cutting it was the easy part, requiring only a few keystrokes and placement of the words into a holding document. I called it my parking lot, and though it would likely never ...
Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide
Far from it. Many essays, for instance, are braided, weaving together two or more strands of story line in an interactive fashion. Judith Ortiz Cofer, in her personal meditation "Silent Dancing," creates a particularly revelatory braid from two strands: a home movie juxtaposed against her own memories of childhood as a Puerto Rican in New ...
Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the "Braided Essay"
Or, Untangling the "Braided Essay" A personal essay of the Steven Hotdog form needs the interior experience, the exterior fact, and the meaning that connects them—in order to work its magic. When I first heard the term "braided essay," a form of creative nonfiction that interweaves multiple storylines or topics, I felt an immediate ...
Candace Walsh, "The Braided Essay as Change Agent" (Assay 10.2)
"Braided essays give the writer the opportunity to accomplish both facets. The reader is allowed to take a journey with the writer while also learning pertinent information on the subject at hand"; the writer is fortified on their journey by the altruistic understanding that readers can learn valuable, even life-changing insights from their ...
The Braided Approach to Memoir
The Braided Approach to Memoir. Our lives are made up of many strands—some of experience, some of memory, some of meditation and reflection, some of ongoing action. Those who write memoir must find the appropriate forms for ensuring that the textures of life will have their full expression. What we know about the braided essay offers us a ...
5 Ways Into Your Lyric Essay
3. Braided Essay. Just as it sounds, a braided essay weaves multiple strands together, with an end goal of creating a work that becomes greater than the sum of its parts. According to essayist Brenda Miller, the writer can explore highly emotional experiences or questions in a circuitous way, rather than head-on.
The Braided Essay (seminar)
Braided essays are complicated and layered, like real life; built on association and resonance rather than a singular A-to-B storyline. They can also let us approach stories from our lives that are overwhelming—either emotionally or conceptually. Refracting and weaving can present new entry points into writing about experiences that may have ...
9 Types of Personal Essays
3. Braided essay. Mostly only found in literary magazines, these often are longer essays, ranging from 2000-7000 words. Due to their length, they can be hard to publish. Braided essays are ambitious, braiding together three (or more) storylines. The multiple storylines make it possible to write a 20-page essay that stays engaging.
AMS :: Comm. Amer. Math. Soc. -- Volume 4
CURRENT ISSUE: Communications of the American Mathematical Society. Launched by the American Mathematical Society in 2021, Communications of the American Mathematical Society (CAMS), is a Diamond Open Access online journal dedicated to publishing the very best research and review articles across all areas of mathematics.The journal presents a holistic view of mathematics and its applications ...
The Architects of Hades Strive to Bewitch Gamers Again
Supergiant Games, a small independent studio, had always tackled new projects. Then its dungeon crawler featuring the Greek pantheon became an enormous success. By Brian X. Chen Brian X. Chen, The ...