Craft Talk: A crucial technique for writing first-person nonfiction.

James Baldwin was a master of it. Plus, a generative prompt...

Hello everyone! Thanks for following along and for those who commented last week. Today, I’m writing about a vital and often overlooked technique that helps create a capacious, multi-layered narrative by helping us pivot from one timeline to another or from one “discourse” to another. It’s a technique that can help you write about ideas or about the self changing in time. It’s what I call the “palimpsest narrator” or the “palimpsest voice.”

The key idea is that this “palimpsest voice” or “palimpsest narrator” solves a common problem in nonfiction (and some kinds of fiction, too!).

The problem we’re solving for

In nonfiction, the essayist/memoirist has to establish two authentic but possibly contradictory perspectives:

• The author self writing now, who is more knowledgeable, or wiser, or better at synthesizing ideas, than the earlier self she is writing about.

• The character self “then” that is in scene and knows less than the author self

• Alternatively, in certain kinds of hybrid researched nonfiction you may be trying to pivot from the writer in the present who has done the research back to the self that started the project NOT KNOWING.

One thing I notice reading drafts of books: writers often tell their story scene by scene without the benefit of the perspective that the present-day writer has. Several times I’ve said to a student something like, “Your character here is driven wild by grief, to the point that she lacks perspective—why didn’t you signal that you know she is behaving erratically?” One responded, “Well, the person I was didn’t know that then, and I wanted to be authentic.” That student’s concern about being authentic to that past self is a valid one: if you’re writing about emotional hardship, you want to get up close to the distorted thinking that can follow a loss.

But the problem of a purely chronological approach, in which the writer’s perspective doesn’t answer until the end, is that the reader can feel she understands more about the situation than the writer does. We turn to memoir and personal essays to experience intimate contact with other minds and lives; if you hold back, you’re thwarting that contact. Memoir is based on the establishment of a specific form of trust between the reader and the writer/narrator, inspired by our sense that the writer has some wisdom or valuable perspective to share. (Novels are a bit different, because we enjoy unreliable narrators; and yet what I’m about to write should be helpful to fiction writers too, if you work in multiple chronologies.)

So: How could you signal that both the “character self” and the “author self” are present in a text, without confusing the reader or yourself? You use the technique I call the palimpsest voice, which allows you to pivot back and forth while not muddling things, so that fourteen-year-old you seems weirdly precocious.

What is a palimpsest?

One dictionary’s definition:

1. Writing material (such as parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased or partially erased

2. Something having diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface.

I love this second definition, because it speaks to what we are trying to do as writers—to create a text with “diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface,” right? So sometimes I ask students or writers, What could it open up if you think of the text of your piece as a surface that has “diverse layers or aspects” beneath/within it?

Wikipedia identifies this as the Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus, a palimpsest of a 5th century Greek version of the Bible.

Here are two helpful examples.

Both are from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, specifically, the second essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The piece is about a religious criss Baldwin underwent at fourteen and about what it led him to see about America, race, whiteness, and religion. It’s a piece that presents a clear and urgent argument, but does so using the techniques of memoir and the personal essay, and so I think it will be interesting to many of you. James Baldwin was James Baldwin in part because of how he thinks on the page, using his autobiographical past as text to be “read” by the present-day writer.

It opens by setting up the first person as what I call a palimpsest self; we are clearly in the hands of a sophisticated present-day thinker, but that thinker is also going to summon up, through deft detail, what it was like to be his fourteen-year-old self, smart, pained, and searching:

I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word "religious" in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word "safety" brings us to the real meaning of the word "religious" as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.

Let me quickly annotate the passage. I’m putting in bold the PRESENT day author, writing about his past self:

I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use the word "religious" in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born in a Christian nation, I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fact, of our church—and I also supposed that God and safety were synonymous. The word "safety" brings us to the real meaning of the word "religious" as we use it. Therefore, to state it in another, more accurate way, I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.

Note how the exposition of this first paragraph involves a kind of sliding back into the past, beginning to paint a picture of that fourteen year old boy. Note how the bold parts bring context, insight, and dimension to the autobiographical material: Baldwin is really thinking on the page, along with narrating the story of his life.

Now, consider how the paragraph might read without the bits in the explicitly present-day voice—if it were more narrative, and less focused on reflection:

I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. I accepted this Deity as the only one. I supposed Him to exist only within the walls of a church-in fact, of our church. I became, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.

Consider how different the two passages are. Both are deeply shaped by a present-day narrator introducing us to the past. But my edited version brings us more fully into a “past” self’s narration, without the benefits of the present-day essayist thinking about the past self and how he saw the world—as only the Baldwin of now can do.

Baldwin’s essay was originally published in The New Yorker in 1962. You can read it online if you are a subscriber.

Before we move forward, note two things about how Baldwin does this:

1) The “present-day” comments are largely in stand-alone sentences OR tucked into an aside set off by commas, which makes the pivots in the voice clearly defined by syntax and punctuation.

2) The present-day moments of “thinking” are very, very brief.

That brevity and clarity are essential to executing the palimpsest voice.

Consider a better example, from later in the same essay. In this passage, Baldwin is “entering” the mind of the religious teenager—Baldwin was a preacher for a time as an adolescent—who thought that Jewish people were “beyond any hope of salvation.” But Baldwin the present-day writer is also, crucially, critiquing and observing that fourteen year old’s thinking. I’ve put some moments we can attribute clearly to the establishment of a “present-day narrator” in bold, but of course he is so good at doing this that one can quibble with what I’m doing. In a sense the palimpsest voice here means the whole thing is equally inhabited by both selves, but not in a confusing way:

It happened, as things do, imperceptibly, in many ways at once. I date it—the slow crumbling of my faith, the pulverization of my fortress—from the time, about a year after I had begun to preach, when I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, fatally, with Dostoevski. By this time, I was in a high school that was predominantly Jewish. This meant that I was surrounded by people who were, by definition, beyond any hope of salvation, who laughed at the tracts and leaflets I brought to school, and who pointed out that the Gospels had been written long after the death of Christ. [[[ED. NOTE: This is clearly the fourteen-year-old’s perspective.]]] This might not have been so distressing if it had not forced me to read the tracts and leaflets myself, for they were indeed, unless one believed their message already, impossible to believe. I remember feeling dimly that there was a kind of blackmail in it. People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell. I was forced, reluctantly, to realize that the Bible itself had been written by men, and translated by men out of languages I could not read, and I was already, without quite admitting it to myself, terribly involved with the effort of putting words on paper. Of course, I had the rebuttal ready: These men had all been operating under divine inspiration. Had they? All of them? And I also knew by now, alas, far more about divine inspiration than I dared admit, for I knew how I worked myself up into my own visions, and how frequently—indeed, incessantly—the visions God granted to me differed from the visions He granted to my father. I did not understand the dreams I had at night, but I knew that they were not holy.

Wow, this passage is so full of deft weaving of perspectives, of the then-boy and the now-writer—it evokes so clearly what it was like to be a fourteen-year-old religious teenager. At the same time, the clarity of the syntax affords Baldwin the ability to constantly deepen his portrait of himself. The passage is a masterpiece of the kind of reflection that personal writing can lead to. I tried to edit this to imagine that Baldwin wrote the passage more “in scene,” with deeply metabolized, reflection; but disentangling the past-and-present is hard here, because the past is seen through the present:

A year after I had begun to preach, my faith crumbled. I began to read again. I justified this desire by the fact that I was still in school, and I began, with Dostoevski. I was in a high school that was predominantly Jewish. I was surrounded by people who were, by definition, beyond any hope of salvation, who laughed at the tracts and leaflets I brought to school, and who pointed out that the Gospels had been written long after the death of Christ. There was a kind of blackmail in it, I thought. People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell. Their disbelief forced me to read the tracts and leaflets myself. I realized that the Bible itself had been written by men, and translated by men out of languages I could not read. Of course, I had the rebuttal ready: These men had all been operating under divine inspiration. Had they? All of them? But I knew how I worked myself up into my own visions, and how frequently—indeed, incessantly—the visions God granted to me differed from the visions He granted to my father. I had unholy dreams at night.

It’s not terrible—though the rhythms feel off due to my truncations; getting rid of Baldwin’s thoughtful asides makes the prose choppy. It also makes this passage feel less sophisticated, not the fully-dimensional product of a mind at work on its material—which in this case happens to be autobiographical. This is thinking on the page at its best.

What else do you notice? There is, of course, much more to say here.

So here is your prompt. Write part of an episode or scene that is crucial to your essay or book project and make sure to use the palimpsest voice. Pay close attention to economy and clarity and honesty and how syntax can signal you are shifting from past scene to present interpretation by inserting small “I” phrases in the present. Note how Baldwin says “I remember, dimly…” Keep in mind the very, very brief asides: “I was forced to realize…”

When you’re done, read the passage, and make sure it’s not confusing or too labored (this can easily start to feel mannered/fussy if done self-consciously). Make sure that you are clear about what parts are the past self thinking/acting, and what are the things that you, as writer, are able to add with the benefit of hindsight (as well as what is lost—“dimly”—to time).

You can also try this exercise if you want to pivot in and out of research sections and narrative sections. Or use the palimpsest voice to comment on/frame/contextualize your research, making it unfold in a more narrative way. (I used this technique a lot in THE INVISIBLE KINGDOM.

Enjoy, and let me know how it goes! Oh: And please become a paid subscriber if you are enjoying posts like this! This work, though I love it, and our community, takes me away from my own writing…

PS: Two big mistakes I tend to see are:

a) people lapse out of scene into a present day voice commenting but do so without, as it were, signaling to the reader that they are doing so—through punctuation, etc.

b) people pivot back and forth in chunks that are too large, so that they lose all momentum. That is, they slide out of the past-time “scene,” comment on it for two or three paragraphs, then go back, and then forward, again, but each time at too much length. So try to avoid doing that! (Of course, using full sections to move back and forth in time works; but I find that it’s really hard to do it in two-paragraph chunks.)

Happy weekend,

xo Meghan