A few months ago, essayist/poet/fiction writer/superhero Ira Sukrungruang told us the following, during a guest workshop: “Don’t write like a suburb.” In other words, don’t write bulky, indistinguishable paragraphs akin to what comprises the thesis-body-conclusion essays we were taught to write in freshman English. Perhaps I’m a providential airhead, who galumphed into a graduate program without quite knowing how I did so, but I found this advice to be groundbreaking. (Suburb-detonating?) I have since made it a point to look for meaning not only in the words, but also in the physical structure of the prose on the page, much like one looks at clouds to find shapes.

In spite of my blue-eyed idealism, this is nothing new. 10th Century Japanese Essayist Sei Shonagon, in her essay “Hateful Things,” spits out paragraphs concerning the seemingly random things she hates. Some are only a sentence, others long; paragraphs about mice are tiny, whereas the government gets a larger paragraph. The structure lends itself perfectly to an essay about daily annoyances. (Hate is somewhat hyperbolic in the essay, though isn’t it anyway, 75% of the time?) After all, if one were to hear a mouse scuttling about the linoleum bathroom floor at 3 in the morning, one would not state to his bed partner: “In the next five minutes, I’m going to explore the hatred I feel for the  mouse scurrying all over the bathroom,” nor would he support his claim with evidence he’s spent hours researching.

Says Shonagon: “Very hateful is a mouse that scurries all over the place.”

That’s it. Although one would probably contemporize the phrasing to, “Fucking goddam mouse,” or something, the point is, by keeping paragraphs short and variable, Shonagon lends clarity to the reader by writing the way annoyances are expressed – short, and without a whole lot of thought. (There is a link to all Shonagon’s bursts of hate, of course – otherwise it wouldn’t be a famous essay, but I’ll save that for a research paper.)

What are some cool examples of unexpected structure you’ve seen throughout the years?