The Alchemy of Collections

The essay below appeared first in one of my e-newsletters. Click here to subscribe and receive monthly writing tips and early notice about my upcoming workshops.

When I first heard “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” I didn’t understand the expression. I had just graduated; my college training in science and engineering focused on breaking things into parts or assembling parts. There was no slop in those equations. No alchemy—as decreed by the laws of physics.

The phrase is usually attributed to Aristotle. But what he actually wrote, in Metaphysics:

In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause; for even in bodies contact is the cause of unity in some cases, and in others viscosity or some other such quality.

In essence: organized in some way, parts form a whole whose qualities differ from qualities of the parts alone.

That’s logical. A cake has different qualities than each of its ingredients. A soccer team scores more goals by supporting each other than individual players could separately.

Yet now, as a more experienced reader and writer, I feel sure that something besides logic holds sway. Poems, stories, fragments, and essays gain new, ineffable qualities when collected. The whole—whether a single-author collection or an anthology—swells with significance. Common threads weave pieces together. The pieces “talk” to one another. Once assembled and bound, the meaning of each is altered and amplified.

How can you make the most of this alchemy as you gather your poems, stories, fragments, and essays?

Consider:

What is the shape of the journey you want readers to take? Maybe you want to lead readers through a spiral or labyrinth, introducing them to an idea or question, leading them through other experiences to shift their perspective, then reuniting them with the original idea. Claudia Rankine said that her groundbreaking collection Citizen: An American Lyric, “string[s] together a series of microaggressions to replicate the feeling of accumulation—and also to prepare the reader for the macroaggressions, those moments when people are actually killed or abandoned.” Through this trajectory of accumulation, she “wanted to show that anyone who was involved in the earlier microaggressions could also have ended up as a victim in the later macroaggressions.”

Some collections follow natural patterns of time. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights gathers brief pieces written daily, starting with Gay’s birthday, for a year. Others follow the shape of a space. The pieces in Joan Wickersham’s No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck trace her journey through the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Wickersham’s arrangement mimics a re-creation of the iconic ship whose wreck the museum is built around even as it excavates and reassembles the author’s past.

Maybe your collection’s journey resembles a seesaw, each chapter or section contradicting the one preceding, or by placing the fulcrum in the middle of the collection, surprising readers and signaling a major shift.

A mandala, pyramid, waves—what shape does your material call for?

What theme(s) will you highlight and how? Will you establish a theme and offer variations? Will your theme begin as a faint note and crescendo to resound forcefully by the end? Will your pieces address themes in multiple ways, creating a kaleidoscopic or fractal effect? Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, collects stories about her near-death experiences, organized not chronologically but by body part. She had been thinking more about mortality since her daughter was born with a deadly allergy, and the book “is about how we carry on in the face of these big experiences…and how we come back changed and different from every single one.”

After identifying your main themes and how you want readers to experience them, you might even revise pieces to strengthen your desired emphasis and outcome.

How do your parts match or contrast in mood, style, scope, or action? Will a mood persist even through pieces that vary wildly in style? While variation creates interest, do any parts diverge so dramatically that they would pluck readers out of the odyssey you’ve crafted, and therefore must be cut? Can the last line or image of one piece lead to the beginning of the next? Can an action recur in different circumstances in different pieces?

The recurring images in Natalie Diaz’s collection, Postcolonial Love Poem,

…were built from my image system, my way of constellating languages and images… ‘Repetition,’ some might say, but I’d like to imagine the appearance of these word as ‘beginning again.’ I want to let language be what it is, an energy that is new each time it is uttered, or each time it fires the brain toward ‘meaning’ or ‘lack of meaning,’ each time it rings the bones in the ear.

There are practical considerations in assembling a collection—for example, writers are wisely counseled to position their strongest piece first and another strong piece last. But when it comes to alchemy, whether or not your design for the whole is obvious, readers will be moved by your purposeful arrangement.

Sometimes the assembly can even surprise the writer. Starting with a handmade blank “guest book” while on tour with my essay collection, Shelter and Storm, I encouraged audience members to add their own stories of shelter and storm. The book became an accidental anthology of fellow travelers on a shared journey.

I think about this alchemy a lot! Even as I work on a new nonfiction book, I’m cooking up a new anthology and a story collection. I look forward to discovering how the pieces will complement each other and develop deeper meaning.

How will your pieces grow stronger in unison?