Let the Material Choose Its Container

A form is more often chosen by prestige or by habit than by what the material needs: the novel, because novelists are taken seriously; the poem, because poetry seems purer; the memoir, because it sells. The mismatch shows up as padding, when an idea the size of a long essay is stretched across a book, or as crushing, when material that needs room is forced into fourteen lines, and it tends to make a work harder to finish, because every page is working against its container.

Jorge Luis Borges made the unusual choice and said so. Composing vast books, he writes in the prologue to The Garden of Forking Paths (1941), is a laborious and impoverishing folly: five hundred pages to set out an idea that can be told in a few minutes. The better procedure is to pretend those books already exist and offer a summary or commentary on them. Carlyle did it in Sartor Resartus, he says, and Samuel Butler in The Fair Haven. Then, calling himself more reasonable, more inept, and lazier, he reports that he has preferred to write notes on imaginary books. In the same volume “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” takes that shape, a literary-critical notice about a writer who never existed.

Different forms make different things cheap. A lyric poem makes compression and sound cheap. A play is bodies in a room and speech under pressure, with interior life available only if someone says it aloud. These are tendencies, plenty of good work defies them, and they are no argument for changing forms often.

Anne Carson’s Nox is material finding a container no standard book offered. Its publisher describes it as an epitaph in the form of a book: a facsimile of a handmade book she made after the death of her brother, with old letters, family photographs, collages, and sketches pasted in, her typed poems added, and her translation of Catullus’s poem 101, written for his dead brother, as the lens through which she approaches the loss. It arrives as a book that folds out like an accordion, in a box. Carson’s book works because it was a real object before it was a published one. An experimental container chosen for its own sake is prestige too.

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation (2002) found its container through failure. According to published accounts, Kaufman was hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s 1998 nonfiction book The Orchid Thief and struggled with the job. The screenplay he delivered is about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt that book, and it is credited to him and to his fictional twin brother, Donald. It was a bet that could easily have failed, made after the plainer route had stopped working.

The habitual form can be exactly right. A poet may need the same stanza all her life, and constraint is not a prison (Practice 69). “What the material needs” also includes what can be finished under your actual conditions, commissions, venues, and deadlines among them. A short essay that exists beats a novel that doesn’t.

Practice. Take one idea you want to write about and sketch it in three forms, 150 words each and forty-five minutes in all: the opening stanza of a lyric (or the whole poem, in ten lines); the first paragraph of an essay, with its central claim; and the opening scene of a story, play, or screenplay, saying who wants what and where. Beneath each, note in one line what the form made easy and in one line what it made impossible. Then ask which sketch you keep wanting to extend, which is not necessarily the one you like best.