How (and Why) to Think on the Page

Why I want to popularize the term "thought arc."

The art of thinking on the page is as key to writing as any other tool. (Photo by Enes Gundogdu on Unsplash)

What a week it’s been. I came down with a virus the day after the election and lost my voice, which felt a little too fitting. I’m still reading and thinking and learning about what happened in the election, and I needed to make room for the enormity of the past week by hitting pause; did you? But I can say that I now take comfort in going back to the work of writing, of saying things exactly as I think they need to be said.

So I wanted to talk today about thinking on the page and how to weave together narrative, argument, and the writing of ideas. (To make up for missing last week, when I was sick, I’m going to post two craft talks this week.)

Thinking in nonfiction: a dynamic process of fastening a mind to the page

Thinking on the page is not just about assembling facts in a logical order. Here, I want to talk about how weaving narrative with thinking on the page relies on techniques that allow to embody thought in language, to think about thinking, that is, as a kind of dynamic process that can be fastened to the page. While writing workshops often talk about character and story arc, I like to talk with students or writers I’m editing about what I call the “thought arc” of a given text.

I came up with the term “thought arc” when trying to explain the structure and shape of my own essays and books to myself. In general, in my work as a nonfiction writer, I’m interested in weaving autobiography and research together to complicate an existing cultural narrative that seems to me to be reductive. That means that usually the books I write resist closure and tidiness even as I spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the books immersive and propulsive for the reader. I’m often trying to dramatize experiences in a way that doesn’t falsify or sentimentalize it in an era that tends to package stories in false or sentimental ways.

In the end, the way that nonfiction thinks about the experience it curates in a memoir or essays is what transforms mere autobiography into literature, or metabolizes isolated event into meaningful narrative.

 Enter “the thought arc.”

The thought arc is what allows me to avoid sentimental closures while (I hope) offering a sense of arriving somewhere new, and different, from where a book started. A challenge of writing my last book, The Invisible Kingdom, was that it explicitly rejected traditional illness narratives of overcoming adversity. Instead, I tried to ask: What makes so-called “invisible illnesses” invisible, and how did our medical system—which is so good at acute care—end up being so disastrous when it comes to chronic illness care? Why does it struggle to treat bodies that live at the edge of medical knowledge?

That book had to have an arc, but it couldn’t be the story of dramatic overcoming of illness, because I was writing about uncertainty and the kind of illness that doesn’t resolve. But without structure, the book would have been unreadable; the experience I was writing about was anti-dramatic, an experience of repetitive pain and suffering. I needed something that would carry the reader through. So what would it be? I was able to write The Invisible Kingdom when I finally realized it was an account of setting aside one idea for another. I wasn’t writing about getting better. I was writing about letting go of an initial, deeply held goal—“I want to figure out how to get better”—in order to to think differently about disease—more fiercely, more honestly, more clearly—in a society that was pathologically uninterested in my experience.

The book opened up to me when I understood that what was needed was a thought arc to dramatize how urgent these problems were not just to me but to many of us—to society itself; it would help make the reader feel invested in following the evolution of my own thinking.

A few techniques I rely on…

Here are a few techniques I ended up using to dramatize thinking on the page:

1. “Palimpsest narrator.” In order to make the change in my thinking seem dynamic on the page, I needed to establish two equally compelling “selves” on the page, or what I call a “palimpsest voice.” One who thought the way I used to; and one who had come to realize that she had been asking the wrong set of questions to start with. I needed to introduce the reader to the naive former self, and the more radicalized or informed narrator. I needed an “I” that could deftly and seamlessly pivot back and forth between past and present speaking selves, two related but distinctive personae on the page. (We will dive into this technique more extensively later this week, exploring the idea of how a palimpsest can help us.)

2. Formulations/ perceptions: I talked in a previous newsletter about the reasons and ways that one might aim to write “formulations,” in personal essays. That is: Insights that are built into the voice through concise acts of syntax, or acts of perception that are deftly formulated in a single sentence, one that will resonate when plucked out and quoted on it own. E.g., “It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends,” - Joan Didion, opening to “Goodbye To All That.”

3. Structure: If you set up two narrative timelines from the outset, you will be able to pivot from a past where the narrator knows less to a present where the narrator know more. (If you don’t include what the author knows from the beginning, a memoir can feel a little plodding to the reader, who may feel she sees things about the character’s limitations that the author isn’t acknowledging.)

4. Curation of research: Making sure that information and research was very well curated, and that I was telling a story about the research, not just including it as information.

5. Breaking the fourth wall. In some of the best essay and memoir writing, there is a kind of breaking of the fourth wall, in which the writer talks to us about the story and the “why” of the story, the way the act of writing is shaping their thinking. We see this over and over in the work of Annie Ernaux, Kiese Laymon, Hilton Als, Deborah Levy, James Baldwin, and other experts in the form of personal writing.

To give you a taste of all four techniques—which are often combined—consider this portrait of her mother by Annie Ernaux, from A Woman’s Story, translated by Tanya Leslie. Note too that it really is a portrait of a dynamic between mother and daughter, or a way of thinking about a person:

She bought me toys and books under any pretext…Her overriding concern was to give me everything she hadn’t had. But this involved so much work, so much worrying about money, and an approach to children’s happiness so radically different from her own education, that she couldn’t help saying, “You know, we spend a lot of money on you” or “Look at everything you’ve got, and you’re still not happy!”

When I think of my mother’s violent temper, outbursts of affection, and reproachful attitude, I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background. This way of writing, which seems to bring my closer to the truth, relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach. And yet something deep down inside refuses to yield and wants me to remember my mother purely in emotional terms—affection or tears—without searching for an explanation.

She was a working mother, which meant that her first duty lay with the customers who were our livelihood. I wasn’t allowed to interrupt her when she was serving in the shop...

Notice the movement between scene-setting in the past (“She was a working mother, which meant that her first duty lay with the customers who were our livelihood. I wasn’t allowed to interrupt her when she was serving in the shop”) and reflective thinking from a vantage in the present (“When I think of my mother’s violent temper, outbursts of affection…I try not to see them as facets of her personality but to relate them to her own story and social background”). That juxtaposition—which is what I’ll talk in detail about in the next post—is part of what makes Ernaux seem like Ernaux (and, for what it’s worth, part of what makes Baldwin sound like Baldwin).

Note too that the use of image and sound are part of how she makes a voice on the page feel capacious and literary, evoking “This way of writing…relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance” instead of, say, “This way of writing…relieves me of past traumas,” which might feel more jargony and casual. Ernaux is also a deft writer of “formulations,” or precisely observed sentences that allow us to understand that person who is thinking and perceiving on the page; this very sentence is one: “This way of writing, which seems to bring my closer to the truth, relieves me of the dark, heavy burden of personal remembrance by establishing a more objective approach.”

I hope this has been helpful as an overview/introduction! In the next installment, “Thinking on the Page, Part 2,” I’ll dig more deeply through example into the palimpsest voice/narrator, and, by extension, thought arcs.

But as an exercise, you might look at a piece of writing you’re working on and ask yourself what the thought arc is. Try to write it out in one sentence: “X” is the story of thinking x and discovering y…It can feel hokey, but it often leads to real insights for the writer, I find.

P.S. Have you thought about thought arcs before? Now that you’ve got it in mind, are there books/essays/poems you realize you love for their “thought arc” as much or more than their character arc or plot?

P.P.S.: Please consider becoming a paid subscriber if you would like to continue to get access to these craft talks! And send along any areas of interest you have. I’d love to tackle your questions.