A Self Made of Words: Crafting a Distinctive Persona in Nonfiction Writing

Organization

32 } Organization, like point of view, encompasses the work as a whole, given its concern with the arrangement of events or topics—with what comes first, what comes second, what comes third, and so on. Such a structural matter might seem unrelated to the projection of your self. But if you think about it a bit, the way you arrange things will lead readers to form an impression, say, of whether you’re systematic or freewheeling. If you want to be seen as an orderly and helpful guide in an explanatory piece of writing, then it’s best to arrange things in a way that appears logical or sequential. But if you want to be seen as a spontaneous person, sharing experiences, thoughts, and feelings as theycome to mind in an expressive piece of writing, then you might want to mix things up a bit, jumping from one to another without a concern for the logic of things. So the question of what comes first, what comes second, and soon, depends on the prior questions of how you want to come across and on what constitutes the most appropriateorganizing principle for the subject matter and purpose of the piece. If you’re telling the story of a personal experience, the most natural way of organizing events is chronogical, as in the first draft of my vertigo piece, beginning with the moment when I first sat down on the bed and concludOrganization { 33 ing with my visit to the emergency room. Most of us, after all, are so accustomed to the chronological passage of time that we naturally revert to it when telling others about a personal incident. We begin at the beginning— or what we habitually perceive to be the beginning. But suppose instead that we were to begin in the middle of things, somewhat like this: The room was spinning so wildly that it made me think I was going crazy or having a stroke like the one that killed my wife a few years before. How else to account for such an obvious hallucination when I hadn’t had anything to drink, not even a single glass of wine—when I was just sitting on the side of my bed, about to change into my pajamas? Just imagine what you’d think or do if you found youself in such a bizarre situation—so dizzy from the spinning that you didn’t dare try to stand up for fear of falling down. It all started when I got into bed and rested my head on the pillow. The room started to move a bit to the right, then more quickly until the movement was so fast that the room seemed to be spinning out of control. As you can see, I’ve inverted the chronology in this version , beginning with the story of my panicked thoughts rather than with the start of the episode itself. This rearrangement creates an element of suspense about the origin and cause of the spinning room, and it projects an impression of me, of my persona, as being at once panicked about the spinning but self-­ controlled enough to be concerned with the hallucinatory natureof theexperi- 34 } ence and thus with my mental and physical well-­ being. On the other hand, if I wanted to project the quality of a freewheeling storyteller, I might add a few digressive sentences at the end of the first paragraph, reminiscing somewhat like this: “The last time I felt that dizzy was seventy years ago when I got off an amusement park ride, called theTwister. I was just ten years old back then, eager for anything that would give me a thrill. And the Twister certainly did that, but it didn’t make me panic anything like that spinning room.” Alternative organizational strategies can also affect the perception of a written self even in an explanatory work such as the second part of this book, which is intended to be very methodical. For example, when I first outlined the elements of writing that I planned to discuss , my topical outline moved step by step from the smallest to the largest elements of composition—from diction to sentence structure to overarching features such as organization and point of view. So I began by drafting the section on little words. But it soon occurred to me that while an arrangement moving from the smallest to the largest...