The personal essay is flexible
the personal essay is a wonderfully flexible and creative form, as fresh and inventive as the writer wishes it to be.
You must always keep an open mind, be willing to explore
the personal essay is a gentle art, an idiosyncratic combination of the author’s discrete sensibilities and the endless possibilities of meaning and connection. The essay is graceful, wise, and always surprising. The essay invites extreme playfulness and almost endless flexibility.
“There’s nothing you cannot do with it; no subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own structure every time, a structure that arises from the materials and best contains them. The material is the world itself, which, so far, keeps on keeping on.” — Annie Dillard
Always have your reader in mind when writing an essay
Always be careful to bring your reader along on your journey. Always be careful to bring your reader along on your journey. Writing is indeed a solo act, but the result is meant to be shared.
“I sit here in silence writing this small volume of words, and it seems to me the most public thing I ever have done.” — Richard Rodriguez
the need for us as writers to step outside of our own thoughts, to imagine an audience made up of real people on the other side of the page. This audience does not know us, they are not by default eager to read what we have written, and though thoughtful literate readers are by and large good people with large hearts, they have no intrinsic stake in whatever problems (or joys) we have in our lives.
Only by focusing on these anonymous readers, by acknowledging that you are creating something for them, something that has value, something that will enrich their existence and make them glad to have read what you have written, will you find a way to truly reach your audience’.
truly reaching your audience and offering them something of value — is perhaps as good a definition of successful writing as I’ve ever heard.
The objective of the essay is exploration
The personal essay is, of course, personal, meaning of you, from your unique point-of-view. And it is an “assay, ” derived from a French word meaning “to try” or “to attempt.”
The personal essayist (that would be you) takes a topic — virtually any topic under the big yellow sun — and holds it up to the bright light, turning it this way and that, upside and down, studying every perspective, fault, and reflection, in an artful attempt to perceive something fresh and significant. But it is always an effort, a trial, not a lecture or diatribe. The essayist does not sit down at her desk already knowing all of the right answers, because if she did, there would be no reason to write.
we can learn from Montaigne the basic essay impulse: to ruminate, consider, explore. The writer of a personal essay does not begin with an idea and then struggle to prove her point; she investigates, keeps an open mind, goes wherever the thought may lead, and, in fact, may end the essay having still not reached a final conclusion.
”My conceptions and my judgment move only by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering and when I have gone ahead as far as I can, still I am not at all satisfied.” — Michel de Montaigne
Writing is magical
In our highly visual culture — television, movies, videos on an iPad — it is important to remember just how magical good writing can be. It is an act of alchemy, really, this ability of our best writers to transform the abstract lines and circles that represent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet into vivid, too-real-to-be-forgotten experiences.
The job of the writer is to transfer his experience effectively
we as authors arrive at an understanding of our words and intentions well before the reader. It is our job to transfer what we’ve seen, remembered, reasoned, or imagined. If the reader does not comprehend, we have failed to do our task well.
Your emotional reaction on your writing may not be shared by your reader
there exists a vast difference between those thoughts, ideas, and memories that elicit a powerful reaction from you, the writer, and those that will have the desired impact on someone who does not know you or have a stake in your well-being. Certain “private” sentences may seem exhilarating to write and to reread as you edit your early drafts, but if they don’t transmit that same emotional or intellectual experience to an anonymous reader, then they are not doing the job.
In essay writing, aspire for resonance
it gives back to the reader a thought, a memory, an emotion made richer by the experience of another. Such an essay may confirm the reader’s sense of things, or it may contradict it. But always, and in glorious, mysterious ways that the author cannot control, it begins to belong to the reader.
Writing is remembering
”Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.” — Toni Morrison
Identify the successful moves of an essayist
When you run across a moment in someone else’s writing that seems somehow electric on the page, stop, go back, reread the section more slowly, and ask yourself, “What did she do here, put into this, or leave out, that makes it so successful?”
Identifying the specific successful moves made by others increases the number of arrows in your quiver, ready for use when you sit down to start your own writing.
Identify the missteps of an essayist
if you are reading a piece of writing and find yourself confused, bored, or frustrated, stop again, back up, squint closely at the writing, and form a theory as to how, when, or where the prose went bad.
identifying the missteps in other writers’ work makes you better at identifying the missteps in your own.
Tell your reader at the beginning of your essay where you are going
An essay needs a lighted sign right up front telling the reader where they are going. Otherwise, the reader will be distracted and nervous at each stop along the way, unsure of the destination, not at all able to enjoy the ride.
introduced the key characters
provided us with the central question he will be considering throughout the piece
establish your character’s persona
hint at the underlying tension in the essay (e.g., preconceived notions of a place versus the reality that you’ll find)
Provide assistance to your reader throughout the essay
The reader needs travel assistance all along the journey.
If you feel confident that the tour guide knows his territory and has a clear itinerary — even if it is unspoken — then you will relax and fully enjoy the tour. If instead you start to distrust the tour guide (“Is he lost? Did he forget where he is taking me? Can I trust him? ”), then you will become unsettled, distracted, and start paying less attention to the landscape and more to your concerns.
In that metaphor, you, the writer, are the tour guide, and the potentially nervous tourist is your reader. The landscape is the writing you have spent so much time crafting and perfecting.
there are ways to roam without seeming lost. So give your reader no reason to be tense. Let her feel constantly as if she is in competent hands.
Then, and only then, is her undivided attention on your words and images.
Never portray yourself as a hero or a victim
The personal essay reveals. And to reveal means to let us see what is truly there, warts and all.
we are all imperfect, sometimes messy, usually uneven individuals, and the moment you try to present yourself as a cardboard character — always right, always upstanding (or always wrong, a total mess) — the reader begins to doubt everything you say. Even if the reader cannot articulate his discomfort, he knows on a gut level that your perfect (or perfectly awful) portrait of yourself has to be false.
And then you’ve lost the reader.
scrutinize his own life, with no agenda other than finding some truth.
Neither a hero nor a victim be. If the story you share is all about how wonderful you are, why should the reader believe you? And why, other than self-flattery, are you even exploring it on the page? Likewise, if you are pure victim, the dish towel tossed around by unfair family and fickle fates, then what is there to be learned? In truth, most of us are flawed folks who try our best, and on some days we do pretty darn well. On other days? Well, maybe it is best to just go to sleep and start over tomorrow. The struggle! That’s what’s interesting.”
Express yourself in simpler words
he reveals these highly personal details with only the simplest of sentences and words. Novice writers often trip themselves up trying to sound weighty or cerebral, but the truth is that expressing yourself in simpler words requires more craftsmanship and skill than using multisyllabic, flowery language, and it almost always works better.
Don’t settle on the surface; look for what is beneath
The best writers never settle for the insight they find on the surface of whatever subject they are exploring. They are constantly trying to lift the surface layer, to see what interesting ideas or questions might lie beneath.
there are certain “private” moments that feel exhilarating to revisit, and “private” sentences that seem stirring to write and to reread as we edit our early drafts, but they are not going to have the same effect in the public arena of publishable prose. Skloot knows this, and his instinct is to pursue those aspects of his story that are more difficult to reveal, further below his surface feelings, and thus more surprising to the reader.
Do not attempt a resolution; just put readers inside your experience
Notice that he does not resolve his doubts or reach some conclusion to his grief. Instead, he tries only to put us inside of his experience, to show to us and help us to feel how he carries his heartache forward, and moves on.
Use “I” in writing
the idea of never using I in writing is simply bad advice, often leading to clumsy, circuitous constructions.
The memoir essay is all about the I, not just as a source of insight, but as the subject itself. There is no shame in using yourself as subject, and no need to hide that fact behind some veil of objectivity and erudition.
Memoir vs memoir essay
Often, when nonfiction is taught or studied, memoir and the personal essay are placed apart, as separate genres, but the truth is that these two strands have considerable overlap. In theory, one might write memoir and not essay; if, for instance, all that you did was re-create previous events from memory, with absolutely no embellishment or reflection. In practice, however, writers almost never do this. They re-create the past and then reflect on what they have learned, or haven’t learned, about what now makes sense or what continues to be a mystery.
This use of personal experience for reflection — not just “this happened to me,” but “this happened and it gave me occasion to ponder” — distinguishes that thin line between pure memoir and the memoir essay.
Memoir is not navel gazing
it is not enough to simply expose your life, or describe your pain or triumph, as if what you were after was mere attention and acknowledgment. But they are wrong to suggest that most of what is published as memoir suffers from this deficiency.
Memoir is not about “look at me, look at me,” at least not when done well. Instead it is about trying to understand the vexing mysteries of human existence.
The essayist’s style
“The style of the essayist is that of an extremely intelligent, highly commonsensical person talking, without stammer and with impressive coherence, to him — or herself and to anyone else who cares to eavesdrop.” — Joseph Epstein
Writers inspired by Montaigne
William Hazlitt Charles Lamb Thomas De Quincey
Write in an English that is familiar and understandable
“To write a genuine familiar or truly English style is to write as any one would speak in common conversation who had a thorough command of and choice of words, who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes.” — William Hazlitt
trying to write in the tone or style of a literary masterpiece won’t make your work a masterpiece as well. Instead, it will most likely make your work seem peculiar, out-of-date, and will offer an uncomfortable reading experience for those who prefer to be spoken to directly.
It does well to know what came before you, but write for tomorrow, not for the past.
Let that be your target: everyday speech, but with the stammering removed, and the coherence turned up just a notch. That’s the true beauty of writing after all — we can have a good idea, and then revise it to sound even better, and then clear away the brush to make it stand out in the open field.
To Read
- Richard Rodriguez, “Mr. Secrets”
- Floyd Skloot, “Silence the Pianos”
- Virginia Woolf, “The Death of the Moth”