Analogies are supposed to clarify and shed light, but just try explaining how to write an essay using one to a group of high-school teens. If you had the good (or bad, depending on your view) fortune of learning essay-writing from Jensen’s Format Writing, you’ll remember that in the book there are seven distinct “formats” or types of essays, namely: example, comparison, cause and effect, analogy, definition, classification, and process. Analogy essays are currently stumping my students, but thanks to author-artist Tomie dePaola, I may have the perfect example for them.
In her book The Worlds of Tomie dePaola, Barbara Elleman takes us behind the scenes to view this master storyteller’s process. Right there on page 89 is an essay from Tomie himself, titled “Writing Is Like Cooking,” which claims “that writing a good manuscript is like making a good stock.” He then carefully walks us through the laborious stock-making process, and we eventually see how, as with reducing a stock, “when creating a picture book, you need to get down to the basic essentials.”
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