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Options in the Collage Form |
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Perhaps an essay -- strictly defined -- must spell out its conclusions explicitly. But you can take the collage principle a bit further and write an effective collage which fulfills many of an essay's functions but doesn't say what it is saying. It only presents ingredients. Studs Terkel Working ( New York, 1972), for example, is a booklength collage which nowhere explicitly concludes anything from all those monologues, scenes, and portraits of people's experiences of work. The question is whether we understand what Terkel wanted to say. When you just present ingredients, different readers draw different conclusions. But if you do it just right, readers will understand what you are saying, and your message will go deeper for the very reason that readers create it themselves, they don't read it. You've used a purely inductive method. But it's easy to miss. And readers can be understandably suspicious that perhaps you were just too lazy to think your way through your material to a conclusion. They'll think you're just borrowing the style of bad TV documentaries: blip/blip/blip vividness-with-no-thinking. On some occasions you may not even care whether your readers reach your conclusion or indeed whether they bother to reach any conclusion at all. Your goal is only to get these incidents and issues and facts and dilemmas into their consciousness. In certain circumstances you increase your chances of success if you don't even give your own conclusions so that readers don't get distracted by the question of whether they agree or disagree with you. You trust your material itself, sooner or later, to have the effect on readers that you want.And on some occasions, finally, you haven't even reached any conclusions yourself and are not trying to pretend that you have. You are working on something important and you need a few more days or months of living with your material before you can figure out your conclusion and work out a final structure. But you need a finished draft now. Or you want a draft to give others to help you with your simmering. In such a circumstance you can still produce a powerful piece of writing in the collage form.Thus the collage essay provides you with a continuum of choices about how explicit to be. At one end is a piece whose meaning is totally implicit consisting of associatively arranged ingredients: virtually an evocation or even a poem rather than what most people call an essay. At the other end is an orthodox essay (a completely connected explicit argument) which you interrupt only intermittently with blips of scene, portrait, dialogue, or narrative in order to make your meanings more alive. Summary | • | The essential process in cut-and-paste revising: try to avoid all rewriting; make do with clever excerpting, ruthless pruning, and imaginative rearranging. Cut-and-paste revising is most useful if you are in a hurry or if you have a tendency to squelch all the life out of your raw writing as you revise. | | • | The essential process in the collage: choose what is alive and discard what is dead; polish the good pieces and figure out how they want to arrange themselves. | | • | The essential process in the collage essay: don't just explain your meaning (or don't explain it at all); convey your meaning with passages which evoke it or recreate it or present it, such as scenes, portraits, tiny narratives, dialogues, or internal musings. Make your argument or conceptual meaning somehow give birth to itself inside your reader's head. | | • | It would probably be a mistake to give up orthodox essays altogether. You need to master that form because it is so often called for. In certain circumstances you will put some readers off merely by adding a few blips of experiential writing to an essay which is otherwise fully explicit, reasoned, and connected. ("You can't trust his thinking. He's a creative writer. He's too emotional.") And you can get lazy because the collage form requires so much less work. You can get in the habit of not quite figuring out any conclusions from your material. An orthodox essay may not always provide you with the best way to have ideas or even to convey ideas to readers, but it usually provides the best way to clarify, evaluate, and develop further the ideas you have already figured out.
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