Growing up, I was often silenced when I tried to share my stories. The adults around me were too preoccupied with their own lives to pay attention to my fears or joys, to the imaginary worlds I crafted on my own or with my friends. Instead, I was told my tales were unimportant. I was told little girls should be seen and not heard.
For a long time, I believed this.
I believed my life was too small to be a story, which made me feel small in return. I thought this was normal. Many people treated little girls this way, though little boys were encouraged to talk at length about their soccer games or pretend sword fights. Many people treated adult women this way, too, insisting on silence when the men were talking, insisting what women had to say was not worth attention.
When I decided to write about my girlhood, these stories of smallness were the ones I wanted to share. I wanted to write all the narratives adults had deemed unimportant. I wanted to write about the small moments in my life that had a lasting impact, and the many times I had been made to feel insignificant. So, it seemed essential that I utilize brevity to tell these stories.
A small collection of small essays, “Abbreviate,” examines how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept — and even claim — small spaces and stories.
In this book, I share a girlhood shaped by neglect and abuse from adults and saved through the communal care of fierce female friends. These essays probe the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobe with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricochet with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm. Full of stars and scars, “Abbreviate” examines what happens when girls and women are haunted by hunger and self- erasure, asking us to reconsider the space we make for our secrets, shames, and selves.
Creative nonfiction takes many forms, so it can be difficult to determine how to best structure our writing in ways that make memories meaningful for readers. But turning to the themes of our work can point us in the right direction. The thematic hearts of our stories are rich with possibility, and it is only natural that these themes guide our form and structure.
Examining your work for thematic possibilities begins with understanding how your writing operates beyond the story itself. Nonfiction relies not only on the story, but on a larger truth, exploration or reflection that moves the moment beyond the plot and into introspection. For example, in “Abbreviate,” I share the story of my aunt teaching me how to build small model stomp rockets, but the larger themes are about domestic violence and the extreme lengths women must take in order to escape.
Once you have determined the themes of your work, you can then begin to explore how these themes might lend themselves to form and structure. Remember, writing effective nonfiction is not simply about recounting a memory in linear detail, starting with the beginning and then moving dutifully to the end. Rather, it is about immersing the reader in your experience and emotion, both of which are often episodic, cyclical, meandering and other shapes that defy the traditional linearity of casual recounting. For example, in an essay about queer girlhood, I share the story of an unrequited childhood crush, using staccato segments as the structure to share what it was like to have a friend fail to connect the dots.
You might structure your work to mirror your themes. For example, if you are writing about a time in your life where you felt fragmented and disconnected, you might incorporate this into your structure, utilizing segments or blank space to render this experience on the page. If you are writing about a time in your life when you kept repeating the same mistakes, you might utilize repeating lines or images throughout the work. Mirroring your structure after your themes reinforces them by enabling readers to experience them in two ways.
You can also structure your works to contrast with your themes. For example, if you are writing about growing up in a chaotic household, you might impose a sense of order onto your work through the use of alphabetized encyclopedia entries to contrast your lived experience with the reading experience. If you are writing about experiencing childhood abuse, you might utilize graphic memoir to juxtapose the severity of the experience with the innocence of childlike drawings. This contrast creates tension in the work, amplifying both the stakes for the reader, as well as your larger themes.
If trying to determine a structure is still difficult, you might consider utilizing pre-existing forms. Many essays already discuss texts like a family recipe or photo album, a song or video game, so you can turn to the existing texts you examine in the essay for structural guidance. For example, in “Abbreviate” I share the story of playing with Polly Pockets as a child while witnessing family chaos, and I utilize this childhood toy as a structure for the essay, organizing the piece around the various components of the game. Since the texts that you are already discussing in your piece likely speak to the larger themes, utilizing these as a structure for your work can emphasize your larger meaning.
You can also use found forms, like museum placards, nutrition information or horoscopes as a way to structure your piece by inserting your own story inside the pre-existing guidelines of the genre. Sometimes these are referred to as “hermit crab” essays, as writers often will fit tender or vulnerable stories inside larger protective shells. I also think of these as picture frames or photo filters I can use to enhance an experience. In another essay from my collection, I examine toxic masculinity in gaming culture by describing an encounter where I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons. By structuring my piece around the found form of a quest, readers experience the game through reading, while also sharing my encounter with sexist players. Utilizing a found form can be a wonderful way to enhance the larger meaning of a work, calling attention directly to theme through formal and structural experimentation.
Finally, remember that you can amplify your themes on many scales. Your themes can direct you to the overall form and structure of a particular piece, but also to something as large-scale as the shape of your book or as small-scale as your sentence structure.
My focus on the seemingly small stories of the girls and women I grew up with and the ways the world expected them to live small lives influenced not only the length of these flash essays, but also the size of the collection itself, which only runs about one-hundred pages. I wanted smallness to be present in every aspect of the reading process, from the length of time it takes readers to move through an essay to the way the book feels in their hands.
Similarly, I also utilize smallness in my sentence structure, many of the essays comprised of brief sentences occasionally interspersed by longer sentences, creating a rhythm that emphasizes this brevity and the purposeful power of concision.
While initially the thought of writing many essays for a collection can be overwhelming, the guidance for so many of my craft choices was there in the themes from the start.
As a girl, I believed my stories were too small to be important. I tried to silence them, but they would not stop. Now, I know this is because there is power in refusing to silence what others insist is insignificant. There is power in brevity, just as there is power in letting your stories guide your structure.
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of the flash nonfiction collection “Abbreviate.” She is also the author of “Nerve: Unlearning Workshop Ableism to Develop Your Disabled Writing Practice,” “Halfway from Home,” “Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir,” and three poetry chapbooks. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.
