There are two dispositions to creative writing styles: the narrative and the lyric. “Firearm Repair Merit Badge” by Eric Lippe falls into the latter category due to the hybridity of writing genres present.

Narrative writing prioritizes a coherent story. There is a clear cause-and-effect timeline, and the characters are acting on the stage for the audience. In poetry, first-person pronouns are often an indicator of a narrative style, as the audience sees the narrator separate from themselves.

Lyric writing, on the other hand, prioritizes portraying a specific mindset. It is a liminal space. Cause and effect are secondary to the emotion between them. In poetry, second-person pronouns are often an indicator of a lyric style, as the audience sees themselves through the narrator. The audience is essentially watching themselves on the stage.

Although second-person pronouns are relatively common in poetry, they are less so in prose. The genre's extended length asks the audience to immerse themselves in a second-person perspective for a longer period. The suspension of disbelief is more likely to break.

“Firearm Repair Merit Badge” navigates this as a lyric essay. A lyric essay is founded on poetic language and techniques, translating to prose as a recording that’s closer to the future than the past. The meaning-making moment of the lyric essay is found in what is rather than what was.

A hermit-crab essay is a subset of lyric essays: it utilizes an existing format not commonly associated with literary conventions (for example, telling the story of “Hansel and Gretel” through a recipe book).

To be exact, the hermit crab of “Firearm Repair Merit Badge” takes the shell of the Scouts BSA Handbook.

The essay tantalizingly opens with the OutdoorsMen badge to be earned. There is a preamble named “Notes for the Merit Badge Counselor,” followed by the “Welcome to the FIREARM REPAIR MERIT BADGE” section, prefacing the three-part instruction manual endowed with numbered and bullet-point lists, and “OutdoorsMen Tips.”

Coincidentally, it can also be helpful to think of the essay as having three (3) categories. Alongside the lyric essay, there are the personal and researched ones. A personal essay primarily uses one’s own experiences as material, characterizing the narrator with aspects of themselves to explore. A researched essay can also draw on personal experiences, but the main body synthesizes outside sources.

Lyric essays are a sort of middle ground between the personal and researched.

“Firearm Repair Merit Badge” research revolves around guns and the format of the Scouts BSA Handbook. For example:

1. ‍Is your barrel delivering your projectile at the speed and precision needed to achieve its objective?

If not:

• Consider purchasing a Boresnake™. Along with a helping of firearm oil, your barrel can be cleaned quite quickly. Remember, cleanliness is one of an Outdoorsman's Duties and a part of the OutdoorsMan's law.

The numbered and bullet-point lists, along with the bolded text, represent how a handbook organizes information for easy, at-a-glance reading. Here, the numbers pose the question; the bolded text (“if not”) emphasizes the urgency of an undesirable answer; and the bullet point provides potential solutions to change any answer to a “yes.”

The jargon of “boresnake” also indicates the author’s familiarity with guns. A “gun bore” is a gun’s barrel interior, while a boresnake is a portable rope designed to clean a gun bore via snaking.

“Firearm oil” is a fusion of the terms “firearm lubrication” and “gun oil.” All of these terms refer to substances designed to minimize friction and corrosion within guns, although “firearm oil” is part of the OutdoorsMen branding.

Of course, the OutdoorsMen do not exist outside this essay. There is the word, but not the exact organization.

The Firearm Repair Merit Badge, despite opening the essay, does not exist outside it either. The closest analogue in our world is the Rifle Shooting Merit Badge from Scouting America. The essay’s worldbuilding mirrors our own, but it does not directly reflect us one-to-one, as nonfiction is traditionally thought to do.

Bending the truth is the personal aspect of this essay. The author adapts their research into what could have theoretically been published in the fiction genre. Nonfiction was chosen to negate any chance of escapism, and the narrator implicitly carries the author’s commentary on gun culture.

“In the United States of America, the country OutdoorsMen swear their duty to, 79% of murders involve a firearm […] Men, no different from OutdoorsMen like yourself, account for 79% of violent crime.”

In other words, “Firearm Repair Merit Badge” is a hypothetical grounded in the author’s relative reality. This approach falls under speculative nonfiction: a range of hypothetical and/or metaphorical devices to convey a truth beyond direct reach alone.

This differs from the hypothetical nature of fiction. Fiction is inspired by the author’s experiences, but not tethered to them. The story and characters are fully self-sustainable. The idea of work standing by itself without outside context — otherwise known as the death of the author — can be more easily achieved if desired.

Inversely, a nonfiction narrator is a vessel for the author. Although the narrator is only one version of the author captured in a snapshot, the narrator’s relationship to the author primes the audience to consider the author’s relationship to the material.

This ties into the inherently speculative second-person perspective of “Firearm Repair Merit Badge.” The audience is asked to consider how people fall into a perpetual state of mutually assured destruction and what the usage of “you” refers to.

“You are a gun. The first rule of firearm safety is to treat every firearm like it is loaded.”

In one interpretation, “you” could be yourself. Being human is to be consciously capable of great love and violence. You have the capacity to stare down a gun. You have the capacity to fire a gun. There is a cognitive dissonance in accounting for both outcomes.

A loaded gun is not lethal until fired, but a loaded gun should always be treated as lethal to prevent a misfire. A person is not a murderer until they kill, but they could become a murderer by killing you. However you interpret enacting self-defense, you must be prepared to accept the consequences of preparing to do so:

OutdoorsMen Tip

You can file down the firing pin of your firearm until it can no longer shoot, but you will still be seen as a gun.

OutdoorsMen Tip

You are a gun. Your gun is damaged. You are damaged.

These two tips interject at different points of the essay. Together, they carry the thesis of the OutdoorsMen ideology: your gun is an extension of yourself, and a gun only extends from a damaged person, which everyone sees and knows.

And because everyone sees and knows, everyone is a threat.

“Everyone will know you are able to fire […] It is not enough to cease fire. It is not enough to refuse to take aim. They still know your objective by your design.”

The future is unknown. We are not aware of how we might be tested. We will never have the luxury of the butterfly effect being fully revealed to us with our past and present decisions. We can only strive for the future we want to live in. The ending of “Firearm Repair Merit Badge” appeals to one in particular.

Requirements:

1. Put down the gun

2. Put down the gun

3. Put down the gun

With all of this in mind, the usage of a second-person perspective doesn’t necessarily refer to the audience alone. “You” can also refer to the author being spoken to by their own narrator.

There is a clear fascination with Scouting America culture here. It would not be a stretch to imagine the author having a background with the organization. Nor would it be a stretch to imagine the author having experience with guns.

Is this someone processing the conditions they were raised in, clashing against their current outlook?

Or are all of these aspects analogous to something more personal, like an albatross around the neck?

These questions can only be answered by the author. The audience is left to wonder and draw their own conclusions. Those conclusions then further contextualize others made within this essay and beyond.

This is the weight of any approach. The lyric and the narrative prime the audience in their own ways. Even the same message translates differently across genres.

Take autofiction, the cousin of speculative nonfiction.

Autofiction is writing that starts as nonfiction only to shift into fiction without informing the audience. A rendition of “Firearm Repair Merit Badge” in this subgenre could simply be titled “Rifle Shooting Merit Badge” — any ominous language initially omitted to avoid indicating that this is not an official Scouting America manual. The aesthetic from “Firearm Repair Merit Badge” can then creep in without the audience noticing the shift right away.

The ending of this can theoretically remain the same, but the altered lead-up will have the audience arrive in a different form. Albeit an oversimplified designation, autofiction starts with a truth to tell the author’s lie, while speculative nonfiction starts with a lie to tell the author’s truth. The audience always reflects whatever is chosen.

And what is chosen is not necessarily pure in form. Just as lyric essays inherently fuse the personal with the researched, personal and researched essays can host elements of the lyric in segments of poetic writing. Poetry itself can also be analyzed by breaking down the ratio of narrative or lyric language present (e.g., 65% narrative, 35% lyric).

Ultimately, the author decides how they want to guide the audience, but the audience decides what grounds they want to engage with the author’s medium and hybridity.

“You have power. An objective. Arms engineered to cleave life and limb. It is in your nature.”