Fiction, as a genre, gets broken down pretty easily. If you think of “fiction” you know there’s horror, sci-fi, fantasy, romance, and so on and so forth. But when most people think of nonfiction, they tend to lump it all together into one amorphous category. Even “memoir” – probably the most recognizable category of nonfiction – is a pretty broad group. Sure, memoir is a story about someone’s life, but that tells you nothing about what’s going to be in the book at all, does it?
That’s why for this month’s nonfiction knowhow I thought it would be fun to focus on an actual genre of nonfiction essays and talk about what makes it special and how to write this genre well.
But first, if I have to have this stupid tongue-twister stuck in my head, so do you:
A tooter who tooted the flute tried to tutor two tooters to toot. Said the two to their tutor: is it harder to toot or to tutor two tooters to toot?
You’ve probably guessed our subject by now: tutorials. Leaving aside the irony of writing a tutorial to tutor you in tutorials, tutorials are actually an opportunity to write some very rich nonfiction essays, as long as you keep a few rules in mind.
You can’t be talking about a how-to
Well, I am and I’m not. A good tutorial personal essay teaches two lessons: the lesson being tutored in and the lesson learned at the same time. How does that even work? Well, think about the first meal you learned to cook. Whether you learned on your own from a cookbook or from a parent or friend, you probably learned more than just how to make macaroni and cheese. You learned a life lesson too – maybe it was about how adults who aren’t blood relatives can parent us, or about how we learn to parent ourselves when our mothers or fathers aren’t available. Maybe it was about self-sufficiency. And maybe it was about letting an electric stove cool completely before you touched it. Whatever you learned, it went beyond the macaroni. The trick to a good tutorial is that you should teach both lessons. I’ll have better examples later on, but let’s revisit an old essay of my own here. As you read, notice that I did two things. First, I did include the information a reader would need in order to actually make caramelized onions. That’s the conceit of a tutorial essay; it does include instructions or a recipe. The second thing is that the essay is not, of course, about how to caramelize onions. It’s about the importance of gathering friends together, about the importance of doing things that take time, and about what you do with the time you have. That lesson is the secondary lesson.So you’re writing a how-to, but you’re teaching something completely different?
When you sit down to write your tutorial, you should have two lessons in mind that you’re going to weave together. For the sake of an example, let’s call the first one “catching a fish” and the second one “waiting.” When my dad taught me to catch a fish, he also taught me how to wait, and what to do with time as it passes. So if I were to write a tutorial essay about that experience, I’d need to share both those lessons with the reader in order to make the essay really successful. I’d start by writing two lists, like this: Catching a fish Ingredients: a fly, a pole, a river, a vest with a piece of sheepskin on it to store spare flies, four hours. Waiting Ingredients: a thing that is supposed to happen, the time before it happens, things to put in the time. To write my essay I’ll need to include all these things. Fortunately, there’s some overlap up there in the “four hours.” The “main lesson” – that is, the one someone set out to teach me – is how to catch a fish. So that’s the lesson that’s going to be the main framework of the essay, and the one that gives it its title. The secondary lesson is the one I need to hide in the essay, the real “so what” that I’m writing about.How to start:
Title your essay something that signals the reader that it’s a tutorial. “How to …” is always popular. So my essay is “How to catch a fish” – or I could go the other way and title it “How not to catch a fish.” Either one would work.To go fishing successfully you need four things: A pole, a fly, a vest with a piece of sheepskin on it, and a river. The fish is optional.See how this tutorial sets the hook early? Ugh, I completely did not mean to write that pun and I apologize. But at this point already in the tutorial the reader knows what lesson is being taught.
The middle bit
The next thing I’d do with this essay is walk the reader through how to set up the pole, what to do with the things you’ve brought to the river, and so on and so forth. This is the part where I start to weave in the “things to put in the time” part of the secondary lesson. Remember that while your first lesson should be explicit, it’s not necessary to make the secondary lesson explicit or even to say what it is. You’ll want to sneak in some clues for the reader, though:Arrange your tackle box on a flat rock by the river. Rearrange it. If you can’t find a flat rock it’s okay to find several flattish rocks and arrange them carefully. Watch the mud around the rocks: you can’t fish until the mud is all gone downstream so you might as well open the tackle box and take out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, homemade raspberry jelly with the seeds in. Watch the mud settle as you eat.See how “time passing, and finding things to do with the time” is woven in?
The grand finale
Y’all, it is going to be incredibly tempting to put in a little summary of your secondary lesson in the last paragraph. Something like “I came to learn to fish, but I learned how to wait instead.” Don’t do it. It’s coy, it’s cutesy, it’s cliche, and it’s boring. It’s also an example of not trusting yourself as a writer to adequately convey that secondary message, and not trusting your reader to find it. Don’t do it. Don’t. Just don’t. But I really wanna. No, you really don’t. What you really wanna do is find a beta reader and ask if they can figure out what the secondary lesson is. If they can’t, the solution still isn’t to tell the reader what it is; just go back to your list of ingredients for the secondary lesson and make sure they’re all in the tutorial. If they are, go back to the list again. Think about trying to teach the secondary lesson as a primary lesson. Do you have enough ingredients on your list? Maybe you need to add a couple. Make sure the reader has all the information you had which led you to the secondary lesson. Then end your essay something more like this:Put the empty cooler that you planned to use as a creel in the back of the truck and go to Phil’s Frosty for a milkshake. Get home at 8:30, just like you’d promised.
Thanks for almost writing an essay, but I could really use a few more examples
Before I give you this utterly fantastic list of examples, I want to remind you of two things:
- Write like yourself, not like examples. That is, don’t give up your unique voice just because you’re trying to write in a new genre. As you go through the examples notice how each writer still sounds like themself, not like each other.
- Only you can tell your stories your way. That makes them important no matter how good another writer is at telling a similar story. Sometimes when I read examples I despair because they’re really that good and I’ll never be that good at that particular thing. But those authors will never be as good as I am at telling my stories, either. Tell your stories instead of feeling intimidated that someone who’s been at this longer is better at it than you. Or put another way: there’s such a thing as Olympic speedwalking, but you probably walk around your house anyway, even though you’re not as good at walking as they are.
I’m going to go the lazy route with these examples and just direct you to a site that publishes mainly tutorial style essays, Dead Housekeeping. As you scroll through the essays and their curated “noteworthy” section, keep an eye out for YeahWrite alums! Dead Housekeeping limits submitted essays to 250 words – feel free to try that length or to stretch your essay toward our 1,000 word limit [Ed’s note: the word limit is 750 words now! /asha].
See you on the grid!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
