How to Build Scenes and Create Structure in Personal Essay

Lesson 2 of 8: Finding Your Essay's Heartbeat

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In Lesson 2, we’re going to look at scene, the building blocks for your story, and structure, the scaffolding or container for it. Before we dive into the Readings, I want to share a resource. Every art form has its own language; the words used to describe what it is and how it’s done—the craft. Already in Lessons 1 and 2, I’ve used several craft terms (e.g. scene, narrative, conflict, theme, point of view, etc.)

I’ve created a 2-page resource called The Language of Creative Nonfiction Writing Craft. I list and define 20 different points of CNF writing craft along with questions to consider as you read and write. This will serve as a reference for you throughout the course and going forward.

→ DOWNLOAD: The Language of Creative Nonfiction Writing Craft←

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Take some time to read the two essays that we’ll focus on today:

“Taste Test” by Eric Lemay

“Strawberry Tongue” by Danielle Harms

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What is scene?

Simply put, a scene happens at a specific place, at a specific time and often includes dialogue. You can start a personal essay in many ways. Starting with a scene can draw the reader directly into the story.

Let’s start with “Taste Test” and see how Eric Lemay draws us in and builds a scene. Lemay opens the essays like this:

I am heading up the stairs, carrying a tray with three tubs of sherbet and as many spoons. In a week, on International Transgender Day of Visibility, I will tell the world I’m nonbinary—the world, in this case, being my 658 followers on Twitter—but right now I’m about to tell the person I love most. He’s six. He loves taste tests. 

“Really?” he asks, eyeing the tubs.

“Yep,” I say, setting down the tray on a battered trunk we use as a table. I line up the spoons. He grins. 

Where does the scene take place? It starts on the stairs, as the narrator walks up.

When? A week before International Transgender Day of Visibility.

And there are two lines of dialogue” “Really?” and “Yep,” 

Viola! A scene.

Lemay drops the reader right into the scene, on the stairs with the sherbet and spoons on a tray. This approach is called starting “in medias res,” which means “in the middle of things” –a great place to start. And as we talked about in Lesson 1, personal essay can often be grounded by a small, humble thing from everyday life, like a father and son eating sherbet.

Once Lemay has the reader in the action, then he provides some backstory and set up for the essay and its theme. The narrator will tell the boy he loves most that he is nonbinary and later share this fact more widely via Twitter. Father and son dig into the sherbet and we, the readers, are hooked, waiting for the announcement.

A point of craft to note. Lemay writes the essay in present tense. I am heading… He’s six…He loves..he asks…I say… Why?

Present tense carries an immediacy to it. Present tense makes the reader feel as though the scene is unfolding in the moment. It’s another way to draw the reader in.

Lemay moves on to provide backstory through exposition—he tells the reader when he recognized that he is nonbinary (at 51) and how that made him feel. Next, the scene expands. 

So, buddy, there’s this thing called the gender binary. It’s why you call me “papa” and mama “mama,” and … that buddy is me.

Reread that paragraph. 

For a full paragraph, the narrator/father describes the concept of gender and the term nonbinary with sophisticated, adult language and examples. 

As it closes the narrator says: In the end, I decided I needed something a little more child-friendly than queer theory. I went with sherbet. 

What happened here?

Lemay created an “imagined scene.” He is “perhapsing”—a technique we discussed in Lesson 1. Lemay didn’t forget how he told his son. He considers an alternative explanation first: What if I explain nonbinary to my son this way. Clever writing craft for Lemay to show what he thinks and feels about gender to the adult reader, versus how he ultimately decides to tell his six-year-old. 

From there, Lemay tells the reader the story of buying the sherbet to support his plan. This section is written in past tense because it happened before the primary scene that drives the narrative. The remainder of the story is told largely through dialogue with some actions and a key moment where the narrator reflects.

“And then there are some people who aren’t raspberry or mango, like Taz.” Taz is a gender-expansive kid at my son’s school. I feel a rush of gratitude for this child who knows themself and whose parents know them, love them, and support them. What, I wonder, might my life have been like if, at six, I’d known who I was. What if I’d had parents who would have loved me for who I was? Like so many of us, I did not. 

The father’s internal dialogue (highlighted) is called interiority. He connects the reader to one of the essay’s key questions—Why has it taken him until age 51 to realize and share that he is nonbinary?—and raises more questions as well. You have probably heard the adage, “Show, Don’t Tell.” Yes, you want to show, but telling, interiority—what the narrator thinks and feels—is an important, essential part of personal essay.

Personal essay will include both the story of action (scene) and the story of thought (exposition and interiority). An essayist needs to show and tell.

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There are many ways to structure an essay! 

The structure of “Taste Test” is linear and chronological, a single scene unfolds over a relatively short period of time with some backstory brush stroked in.

Let’s turn to the second essay for today, “Strawberry Tongue” by Danielle Harms. As you read, consider the structure, how it differs from “Taste Test,” and to what effect. Note when the essay is “in scene” and there’s action, and note when the essay moves to “telling,” and the story of thought.

Harms’ essay is segmented. There are six, distinct, numbered parts. 

• Parts I and II: In scene—the narrator participates in a telehealth visit with the pediatrician and her four-year-old son is diagnosed with strep throat. The boy wanders about the room playing Super Mario Odyssey on Nintendo.

• Part III: The narrator reflects on her mother, who is caring for her 89-year-old grandmother in Idaho. The grandmother is dying.

• Part IV: The narrator recalls how she loved the taste of the antibiotic amoxicillin as a kid. Back in scene—the son passes the Nintendo game to his father and asks to phone his grandmother so he can ask her to come back home to Wisconsin. 

• Part V: The narrator thinks about what she calls her grandparents, Gog and Bomp. She describes Gog’s current situation: blurred vision, end of life care, quail outside the glass doors.

• Part VI: In scene—Mom and son meet up in the bathroom, where she has discovered that she also has strep throat. A text comes from her mother with a video of the quail in Idaho. Mom and son make faces in the mirror.

Why use the segmented essay structure?

Segmenting the essay allows the writer to move easily in and out scene and from place to place (Wisconisn and Idaho), and to braid two stories together—the story of how the mother and son get strep throat and their close connection; and the story of her grandmother’s deterioration and the family’s sadness. The structure allows the narrator to explore illness and the family’s relationships through more than one lens and to build the narrative on these loosely connected parts.

It’s beyond the scope of this 8-lesson course to cover the wide range of personal essay types and structures (e.g., lyrical, braided, collage, mosaic, list, hermit crab) in entirety. Each essay type could be a month-long course. But you will see several different ways to structure an essay in the many Readings, and those will serve as good examples and inspiration.

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As always, I’ll point to writing craft at work in the essays we read.

“Taste Test” by Eric Lemay

• Uses the sherbet varieties as a metaphor for gender. He even tells the reader it’s a metaphor! And the title, with an exclamation point, reinforces the metaphor too.

• Bookends the sherbet-eating scene, i.e., the essay starts in scene, segues to backstory (buying the sherbet) and then returns to the opening scene.

“Strawberry Tongue” by Danielle Harms

• Metaphors abound: The son plays a video game set on the moon—He is learning the pull of gravity. Speckles—in their throats and on quail eggs.

• Humor: The four-year-old’s action and speech mimic his grandmother—He tap, tap, taps my forehead. Because you’ve got a good brain in there.

• Bookends the diagnoses of the son and then mother with the same phrase: strawberry tongue, speckled throat, heat in the head. Lyrical. Emphasis.

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✍️ Go back to the essay ideas list you made after Lesson 1, or think of a memorable moment from everyday life, from the past or present, now. Draft a scene. Include who is present, where it is and when. Add details and some dialogue. Repeat.

Write on!

Andrea A. Firth