On Having Too Many Words

and getting in a tangle with the braided essay

Last week I wrote to you with the sad news that my friend and partner-in-writing (as she called me and as I shall now adopt), Wendy Mitchell had died.

I told you, my trusted subscribers, that I just didn’t have any words, which is of course unusual for me what with them being my stock-in-trade.

But I needed to come up with some especially as I was inundated with requests from media to talk about Wendy. Last summer, when our final book, One Last Thing was published in hardback The Guardian newspaper had written to me asking if, when the time came, I would be willing to write an obituary for Wendy.

They had one rule: no emotion, and I wondered how I would ever be able to write about my friend without emotion. It seemed an impossible task.

After Wendy’s death was announced (by her, you can catch up on that post here), the inevitable email arrived from The Guardian, so on Saturday afternoon I read their guidelines for writing obituaries, took a deep breath, and started. How could I summarise her in 900 words when even a million wouldn’t be enough? And anyway, a few days before I hadn’t even had one.

But this was my service to Wendy, as all these other requests from radio and TV have been, I needed to do her justice. But no emotion, remember?

You can see what I wrote here, but afterwards, on Saturday night, I had a big cry. I needed that release, I had been holding my breath for days, being professional to speak on national radio without crying, telling the producers not to show me any sympathy so I could continue her work demanding legislation on assisted dying, and then, in that moment, I just needed to feel. And cry.

On Sunday though, it was time to turn to my own writing, my own tribute to Wendy. I’d decided I wanted to try a braided essay as a form because I was holding so many thoughts in my head that one straight essay did not feel enough.

A braided essay for those who don’t know is when, to put it simply, you write two/three/four standalone essays. These essays are told in a series of standalone vignettes so that you are able to split them and then plait them together.

Some of them might be explicit about your subject matter – for example some of those threads told the story of my friendship with Wendy chronologically from the beginning eight years ago, and the other told the story of all the things I did to keep vigil from afar in the days while I was waiting for my friend to die. And the other can be metaphorical, for example, mine is about how to grow seeds.

The point is that you are asking your reader to hold onto these threads for you, while you weave between them, and somehow, at the end, you tie all those loose ends together, and all the parts make a whole.

At the bottom of this piece, I’ll put some links to braided essays for those who would like to see examples.

I’m following a workshop on braided essays at the moment, and there is a great exercise where you take an essay (you can choose one from the links I provide from the course I’m doing) and copy and paste it into a document and then identify each braid and colour code it. It’s rather fun, give it a go.

But when it comes to braiding your own you need to print it off colour coded, cut up all the sections and then lay them on the floor, ordering them first so that you can see a good spread and balance of various colours… stand back, fiddle about, check again… and then when you’re sure you’ve got an even spread of colour, you look where the seams are, and find patterns, thoughts and connections there, and go back to the writing again, writing into them.

Reader, when I stood back and looked at them on my living room floor, I just felt a little bit crazy. It reminded me of a scene from A Beautiful Mind, made worse by the fact there was not another adult in my house, and instead I looked up and saw my cats staring back at me, and my poor dog stranded on the sofa as if on a desert island that she could not get off for fear (my fear) of my braided essay getting all knotted.

How had I gone from having no words to too many? This braided essay had got me all in a tangle. I quickly gathered all the pieces of paper up and put them in a pile lest someone (the police/social services?!) should knock at my door at that moment.

I had wanted to do something perfect for Wendy, I had wanted to encapsulate our friendship in perfect words, to do the exercise exactly as I’d been told, and yet this desire to write something – to be something – perfect was making me not only stressed, but look quite mad.

I am not doubting this method, it was actually fascinating to lay those bits of paper down randomly and then, yes, look at the seams and see how interesting it was that one thing connected somehow intuitively to another. I’ve yet to examine the seams properly but I know it will be so interesting when I do.

But all I had as I took myself off to bed was Wendy in my ear reminding me that it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to be written now… ‘slow down, take your time, you’re still processing.’

And so, I’m putting my essay in the freezer for now, metaphorically of course – I’m not that mad! (Although, interestingly Joan Didion did actually put her manuscripts in the freezer.)

But in all that madness and tangle of words, I know when the time is right, that I have some good stuff there, and I do feel better for getting something down, for capturing all these thoughts and feelings that have been racing around my head, that is the most important thing, that is why we need words. And it’s important to remember that they don’t always need to be perfect words, that in the moment, some words, any words, are enough.

I stumbled and stammered on Radio Four, I cursed myself for not being as eloquent as Wendy always had been, but there was no-one more forgiving than her. I had done my best, and that would have been good enough for Wendy.

As for my braided essay, those words will come eventually and I will plait them and hopefully they will be neither knotty nor tangled, and when it is ready, you can be sure you’ll be my first readers.

Examples of braided essays, courtesy of Lily Dancyger’s course.

https://www.guernicamag.com/woven/

https://tinhouse.com/intrusions/

https://hazlitt.net/longreads/dark-matters

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