Do I Have a Book?: Pulling Out the Thread in an Essay Collection

The foundation of a book-length essay collection often begins with what will not leave you alone: the  experiences, fascinations, and images you keep returning to in your writing. At first, these obsessions can feel scattered, or even limiting, but with attention, they can become creative guides, pointing you toward the larger questions and answers most important in your life and writing.

If you’re exploring how to build your nonfiction essays toward a linked collection, this course will provide clarity and coherence. Through short weekly assignments, craft discussion, revision exercises, and feedback, you’ll begin to see how your recurring interests connect, what they reveal about your perspective, and how they might cohere into a fuller project.

In the first four weeks, we’ll meet live on Zoom to discuss the difference between “theme” and “topic,” then practice techniques that can help you amplify your personal perspectives more uniquely. Each class will include time to revise a paragraph from a previous assignment using that week’s technique, helping you see how craft choices can deepen and clarify what your work is really about.

Across the course, you’ll write and share three short essays, each focused on a different obsession. As you draft and revise, we’ll look for possible thematic connections, underlying motivations, and deeper patterns emerging across the pieces. Your final assignment will be a preface introducing this miniature essay collection, focusing on the bigger insights it raises and the questions that could continue guiding the project.

By the end of the course, you’ll have a stronger sense of what your writing is “about,” a clearer understanding of how your essays might speak to one another, and more confidence that your obsessions are guiding you—not holding you back—from the book you may be trying to write.

Who This Course is For

This class is for nonfiction and personal essay writers interested in creating an essay collection, particularly if you feel your interests are far-flung or your essays lack a central thread for a book. If you don’t quite feel you have a memoir or a scholarly book but want to pursue a longer project, this is the class for you. I recommend you have written at least a few nonfiction essays, and are familiar with writing in scenes.

Direction and Feedback

You’ll receive written feedback from me each week, with attention to both the techniques you’re implementing successfully and the opportunities for expanding those strengths. I’ll also raise questions about possible themes, larger patterns, and bigger questions to pursue as your essays begin to gather around a shared focus.

In week five, you’lll have an individual Zoom call with me to discuss what is coming up in the writing, what feels important or solid, and what strategies might support future essays. I’ll also send written feedback on your final preface, submitted in week six, so you’re ready to continue developing the collection or begin moving toward a book proposal, if you wish.

My feedback is not only about identifying strengths and opportunities for development, but also about helping you synthesize your thinking: to put together what you may not yet see and offer possible larger pictures your work seems to be forming. Ultimately, my most important role is to help you reach the most meaningful insight you didn’t know you were seeking.

Learning and Writing Goals

Learning Goals

In this course, you will:

• Learn and apply the concepts of rhyming action, objective correlative, and holding ideas in tension in individual essays.
• Read others’ writing and your own to identify common threads and raise more challenging questions about those themes.
• Develop a more unique sense of your own personal values and greater self-awareness in relation to your personal obsessions through class exercises and peer responses.
• Develop bigger-picture thinking without predetermining your collection’s content.
• Leave with the beginnings of three longer essays and a preface that prepares you to begin a book proposal for an essay collection.

Writing Goals

In this course, you will: 

• Write two three-page essays and revise one in greater depth.
• Post online in response to three questions on peer essays–the number of peer responses per week will be contingent on enrollment, but you should count on responding to at least two peers a week.
• Produce a final three-page preface, giving an overview of how the essays produced in class reflect a particular larger theme in terms of the questions raised about it, why you find it important for yourself, what you hope readers can see or consider in the world after reading this collection.
• Have the beginnings of a cogent linked-essay collection.

Zoom Schedule

We will meet on Zoom on Wednesdays from 5:00-7:00PM Eastern during the first 4 weeks of class. In week 5, you will schedule a 1-on-1 meeting with me to discuss your work. 

Weekly Syllabus

Out-of-class reading and peer feedback most probably requires two hours a week, with two hours of weekly Zoom class. 

Week One: Linking Essays by Theme, not Just Topic

We will discuss the difference between theme and topic, after doing an in-class writing exercise to embody this difference. This exercise will also serve as a means of interpersonal introductions within small groups.

Assignment: Write a two-page essay using the class exercise’s structure: choose one of your current obsessions and write three paragraphs about how and why you came to become obsessed with it. Then choose one of the four titles from class and write another paragraph connecting your story with the title.

Week Two: Holding Two Issues In Tension

We will discuss how to inspire reader investment in your personal obsession by practicing raising direct questions in your written work. Generate potential conflicts of interest or doubts inherent in another obsession.

Assignment: Choose another obsession and write a page showing us how you became interested in it. Using your in-class writing, explore what potentially bothers you or what you can’t quite figure out about your obsession. Practice raising questions about these tensions, using some of the forms from class. Additionally, please post one visual image of a specific object under the “Visual Image” thread that you think embodies either your obsession or a tension within that obsession. Peer post due.

Week Three: Objective Correlatives

We will discuss the idea of objective correlatives: what objects are metaphoric for your interests or tensions in your obsessions? We will talk through a particular example as a group and go into break-out sessions for peer discussion. What other objects might be more relevant for the larger thematic issues of your peer? What are the benefits and limitations of this one?

Assignment: Write a “gallery” essay, in which you explore (separately) two to four objects you associate with a third obsession, explaining not just how each object literally relates to your obsession but what might be drawing you personally or metaphorically towards each object. If you had to choose just one object to keep with you, which would teach you the most about why you are obsessed? Peer post due.

Week Four: Rhyming Action

We will discuss the concept of rhyming action–how to use your prose style itself to develop a sense of continuity and growth in both individual pieces and in a larger collection. We will work through a sample in class by breaking out into pairs to examine the sample and identify how it’s using rhyming action. You will then pull up one of your first three pieces and focus on making the first and last paragraph mirror each other in terms of verb usage, actions taken by any characters, setting description, metaphor.

Assignment: Continue to develop the rhyming action in any one of your previous pieces, with especial focus on metaphoric resonance.

Week Five: Checkin’ In With Bryn

Each of you will schedule a one-hour Zoom call with me on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, to discuss your strongest nudges regarding themes or tactics, what questions you are most interested in pursuing in a large project, etc. We will develop a plan for further essays and what to hit in your preface assignment.

Assignment: Read the Nate DiMeo preface to The Memory Palace, posted online. Write a three-page preface, establishing the collection’s topics and larger questions, what pulled you personally to these subjects, and what you hope readers will discover for themselves.

Week Six: Ask For What You Want

In-class reflection: What is now clearer to you about why you’re obsessed with what you’re obsessed with? Pairs: Do you have any other essays already written that might fit into this project? What would you need to refocus on in one to make it a better fit? Write a five-sentence book blurb for your pair peer using the format given in class.

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