Bechtel Prize Judge Diana Khoi Nguyen selected Stacey C. Johnson’s essay, “Rewriting Time: A Braided Narrative Practice,” as the 2026 Bechtel Prize runner-up. The Bechtel Prize is awarded for an essay describing a creative writing teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction.

The Bechtel Prize is named for Louise Seaman Bechtel, who was an editor, author, collector of children’s books, and teacher. She was the first person to head a juvenile book department at an American publishing house. As such, she took children’s literature seriously, helped establish the field, and was a tireless advocate for the importance of literature in the lives of young people. This award honors her legacy. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.

The activity I am about to describe did not emerge fully formed. It began as a series of trials, many of which initially felt like errors.

The class was a newly approved second-semester senior English course—Literature for Writers—designed to provide an alternative means of meeting graduation and A-G requirements in a school where many students struggle to remain on track to graduate. What initially distinguished this group was not a shared literary ambition, but a social one: several intact friend groups occupied tables together, creating a lively, boisterous atmosphere. The camaraderie was genuine and often joyful, though not always conducive to sustained analytical focus. At the start of the year, only a handful of the 36 students identified as writers. Most were primarily concerned with finishing high school.

By second semester, however, we had come to know one another well through poems, personal narratives, and author portfolios. I could name the particular perspective and strength each student brought to the room. It felt like the right moment to ask them to engage more deliberately with complex texts.

That turn toward analysis proved difficult. Frequent interruptions, absences, and the uneven rhythms of a comprehensive public-school classroom made sustained engagement with dense prose challenging. Around this time, I had been reading Time Is a Mother in the mornings—a gift from a former student—and found myself returning repeatedly to Vuong’s poem “Künstlerroman,” which recounts a life backward, unfolding with the uncanny logic of a rewinding tape.

What if, instead of asking students to explain nonlinear time, I invited them to write within it?

I had also long wanted to teach Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life,” which had left a deep impression on me years earlier. The story offers a brilliant model of nonlinear narration in which a life is told backward, from a position of intimate address rather than explanation. Having screened its film adaptation, Arrival, with another class to great success, I hoped this group might respond similarly. I imagined rich discussions about nonlinear time, memory, and meaning. I paired the film with excerpts from the story and anticipated analysis that would move beyond summary.

That did not happen.

Discussion repeatedly stalled at comprehension. Students were attentive, even engaged, but the interpretive leap I hoped for never quite materialized. The problem, I realized, was not students’ willingness, but the conditions of attention in the room—conditions that made sustained analytical discussion difficult, even when interest was genuine. Rather than pushing harder, I paused. In response, I shifted the unit away from interpretation and toward creative writing as a way of thinking through form.

What if, instead of asking students to explain nonlinear time, I invited them to write within it? What if composition could become the site of understanding rather than its reward? The workshop that followed grew out of this question: a braided narrative exercise designed to help students re-vision dominant aspects of their lives by rearranging time, naming opposition, and foregrounding moments of agency and care. 

What follows is the assignment itself, which emerged not from a planned unit but from a moment when traditional analysis had reached its limits.

Braided Narrative: “The Story of Your Life”

Overview

Inspired by Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and its film adaptation Arrival, this writing workshop invites students to explore nonlinear time as a meaning-making practice rather than a narrative trick. Through a process of gathering, rearranging, and braiding details from their own lives, students create a piece that resists a single, linear account of identity and instead embodies a sense of expansiveness, agency, and self-authored meaning.

The process unfolds in two main phases: first, students gather material in discrete forms; then they cut, rearrange, and braid these materials into an experimental narrative that often reads like a prose poem.

Step 1: Gather Details

Students begin by collecting material in three distinct strands. At this stage, no attention is paid to style or polish; the emphasis is on noticing and naming.

Part 1: 10 Key Moments (“You”)

Students list 10 formative moments from their lives in chronological order, writing in the second person (“you”) rather than the first. This decision initially grew out of imitating the narration of Chiang’s story. As the activity progressed, it became clear how the pronoun shift creates a small but meaningful distance, allowing students to observe their experiences with clarity rather than immediacy. The second person functions as a protective lens, particularly for students accustomed to narrating themselves through damage. At this stage, students are encouraged to focus on clarity rather than interpretation. Those who struggled to conceive in second person were encouraged to try a third-person singular.  

The goal is not to explain what the moments mean, but simply to name them with care and precision, emphasizing the sensory detail of each. We explore how, to do this well, particularly with early memory, a writer must re-create the moment from available context––memory-making as a creative act.

Part 2: Personifying Conflict (“They”)

Next, students describe the opposing forces, pressures, or challenges that have shaped their lives. Rather than naming specific individuals, they are encouraged to collapse these forces into a collective antagonist, referred to simply as “They.” This allows diffuse or systemic pressures to become narratable without oversimplification or self-blame, creating narrative clarity while preserving emotional safety.

Students are given the following directions:

For this section, gather notes about antagonists or opposing forces you have faced. These may include people, outside events, fears, or moments of misunderstanding.

You will list these forces and rewrite them as “They” statements, even though they represent different pressures. List about five moments of conflict. These do not need to be in chronological order.

In the left column, note the moment of struggle.

In the right column, rewrite that struggle with the challenge personified as “They.”

Students are encouraged to experiment with repetition, rhythm, and restraint, noticing how the pronoun itself shapes tone and distance. I provide some examples. 

To characterize the challenges associated with COVID, school closures, and the alienation around that time, you might say: They came slowly at first, then suddenly. They took the eldest first, then they came for others. They closed the schools. They shut us inside. They put childhood on pause. They made us look at each other sideways when someone coughed.

In another example, I suggest that while remembering a childhood bully, I might re-create the drama as follows:  They walked up. Saying nothing, they took my tools. They shoved me backward. They left. Saying nothing, I cried.

By collapsing multiple and often unnamed pressures into a single collective antagonist, students were able to give shape to harm without simplifying it or turning it inward.

Part 3: Moments of Redemption (“I”)

Finally, students write brief passages describing moments of transcendence, creative response, recovery, or love—instances in which they acted with agency or grace in the face of opposition. These moments are written in the first person (“I”), restoring voice and authority at key points in the narrative.

After working in second person (“you”) and then displacing conflict into a collective antagonist (“they”), the reintroduction of “I” is intentional: it restores voice at moments of strength and self-authorship.

Students are given the following directions:

For this part, gather notes describing moments of transcendence, triumph, creative response, or recovery from your life story.

You will write these moments using the “I” pronoun.

These moments may be literal, fictionalized, or inspired by role models, stories, or works of art that have shaped you.

List about five such moments.

In the left column, note the moment you want to include.

In the right column, rewrite it as an “I” statement, shaping it as a scene or image.

Students are encouraged to lean into imagery, repetition, and rhythm, allowing these moments to feel embodied rather than explanatory.

We explore some examples. A cinematic moment of perseverance from a favorite film might be translated: I am bruised and bloody, my nose broken, but I am not beaten. (And nodding to Maya Angelou’s classic) I rise. I rise. I rise.

The dramatization of someone’s recurring dream of flight might read like this: I soar above the freeway, out of reach of the horde chasing me. I float above my mother’s head as she pushes the cart through the grocery store, soft light and soft music surrounding us. 

Students then draft five “I” statements of their own, attending to precision and presence rather than justification.

Step 2: Cut, Rearrange, Braid

Once students had gathered material across three strands—chronological moments (“you”), personified conflict (“they”), and moments of redemption (“I”)—the work shifted from collection to composition. At this stage, the assignment moved decisively away from analysis and toward experience.

Students completed this phase in a digital document, allowing them to cut, paste, and rearrange language without erasing it. The material they had generated was treated not as a draft to be refined but as raw matter to be shaped.

They began by taking the 10 chronological moments written in second person and listing them in reverse order, starting near the present and moving backward toward childhood. Line breaks were left between each moment, creating visible spaces in the narrative—gaps that would soon be filled.

Next students braided in their “They” statements, inserting them after the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth “you” moments. These passages named opposition without explanation, allowing conflict to surface as a repeated pressure rather than a single incident.

Students encountered their lives not as a steady accumulation of damage but as something already shaped by response, imagination, and care.

Finally, students placed their redemptive “I” statements into the remaining spaces—after the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and final moments—creating a three-strand structure that alternated between experience, opposition, and agency.

What emerged was not a linear autobiography but a braided narrative that moved backward through time while oscillating between vulnerability and strength. The form itself did much of the meaning-making work. By beginning near redemption and moving toward earlier moments of formation, students encountered their lives not as a steady accumulation of damage but as something already shaped by response, imagination, and care.

For many students, this rearrangement changed the emotional temperature of the work. Writing from the end backward softened shame, while the alternation of voices prevented any single strand from dominating the story. Conflict was contained. Agency was reintroduced. Meaning surfaced not through explanation but through placement.

When students read these drafts aloud, the pieces often sounded less like essays and more like prose poems—fragmented, rhythmic, and strangely cohesive. At this point, revision focused on attention rather than correction: adjusting line breaks, refining word choice, and leaning into the unfamiliar logic of the form rather than smoothing it away.

Step 3: Read, Revise, Polish

Students read their braided narratives closely, often noticing that the piece has taken on the texture of a prose poem. At this stage, they revise for clarity, word choice, and rhythm, experimenting with spacing or alignment and leaning into the strangeness of the form rather than smoothing it away.

Step 4: Title and Share

Students title the piece, sometimes retaining “The Story of Your Life” as a nod to its inspiration and sometimes choosing a title that reflects the new meaning that has emerged. The final step is sharing—whether through publication, workshop, or quiet circulation—so that the work can be witnessed.

Where the Writing Met the Room

The change did not arrive all at once, and it did not arrive quietly.

Student narratives emerged piecemeal, as most writing in this class did—amid an ongoing churn of social dramas, shifting friendships, talk of who was and was not on track to graduate, prom plans, senior night, and the steady in-and-out rhythm of a second-semester senior room. Writing rarely unfolded in long, uninterrupted stretches. Drafts were started, abandoned, returned to. Conversations overlapped. Attention wandered and regrouped.

And still, over time, the pieces began to assemble.

The work did not erase the conditions shaping students’ lives, but it allowed those conditions to be named, held, and rearranged.

Students worked on their braided narratives across multiple days, revisiting them between other assignments, school events, and personal disruptions. What surprised me was not the speed of completion, but the persistence. Despite the noise of the room and the unevenness of attention, students continued to return to the work, adjusting lines, rearranging sections, adding and removing strands.

When the time came to share, the atmosphere shifted—not into silence, but into something more focused. Phones were set aside. Chairs turned slightly. Students listened while still half-embedded in the social life of the room. The attentiveness that emerged was not the strained focus of compliance but something closer to care.

As students read, the nonlinear structure did its work. Stories began near moments of love, survival, or imaginative escape, with conflict entering gradually, braided rather than declared. Because opposition had been collapsed into a collective “they,” no single figure dominated the narrative. The pressure was real but contained. And because the pieces moved backward through time, earlier moments felt newly legible—less like origins of damage and more like points of becoming.

Some students chose to read aloud among their peers at tables. With others, I sat beside them during revision and read their words back so they could hear the charge. Still others created short video essays, pairing their writing with images or sound. In each form, the same pattern held: fragmentation gave way to coherence without requiring resolution. The work did not erase the conditions shaping students’ lives, but it allowed those conditions to be named, held, and rearranged.

What struck me most was not a single breakthrough moment, but the accumulation of small shifts. Students who often narrated their lives through interruption spoke with steadiness. Others, who typically filled space with humor or noise, let the language carry the weight. After one reading, there was a pause—not reverent but real. Another student nodded. Someone said quietly, “Damn. That was good.” Then the room moved on.

In a classroom shaped by interruption and uncertainty, this mattered. Writing became an embodied practice of choosing how to hold one’s life. For a moment, time loosened, and something else became possible.

Featured photo by Sonia Dauer on Unsplash.