Personal Essay and Memoir: How Content Shapes Form in Nonfiction
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In my first personal essay workshop, our instructor wanted us to know what differentiated personal essay from other forms of nonfiction—specifically memoir, even if we choose to eventually throw the “rules” out the nearest window. At first, I was skeptical; the forms seemed so similar. They were both short in length, and both personal in content, so why did it matter? On a practical level, this understanding would help us when we finally started to submit work. For example, if a literary magazine seems to publish mostly personal essays, your memoir essays might be better suited for another venue. On the other hand, knowing how content shapes form in nonfiction is a way to challenge ourselves to write in different forms, to enhance our strengths and creativity as writers.
The names themselves are a simple reminder. The word essay comes from the word assay, which means, to try. While memoir, more obviously, stems from the French word for memory. At the heart of both is our allegiance to telling honest stories. It’s about finding the form that best reveals our specific truth.
In a craft conversation between writers Brandon Schrand and Joe Wilkins on Brevity magazine’s craft blog, the writers discuss the ways in which content shapes form in nonfiction. Schrand writes that memoirs “read with a kind of forward momentum and tend to be conventional in form and execution with rising action, conflict, and some semblance of...resolution…”
Elements of fiction, such as character or plot development and scene building are so important in memoir. They draw on memory and ask the reader to dive in because we want to show you everything. But personal essay is not avoiding intimacy or storytelling, either.
Schrand writes, “the essay, it is good to remember, finds its roots in philosophy...It’s always tending toward questions (not answers) for meaning. It wanders, ruminates, considers.”
In personal essay, the maze formed on the page through the writer’s mental processes is something the reader gets to slip into. Knowing the essay has an end, the reader can enjoy the temperamental space of surrendering to the unknown, to the writer’s journey. (One classic essay that does just this is Virginia Woolf’s “The Death of the Moth.”)
Mary Karr writes in her book The Art of Memoir, “In some ways, writing a memoir is knocking yourself out with your own fist, if it’s done right.” Memoir is how we write a narrative of a particular part of our lives, a space of excavation into parts of ourselves rearranged in story form in a way which renders the mess of our memories—art.
I love creative nonfiction in all its forms, the way even the various distinctions between them often overlap. Writing with a specific form in mind can help inspire our creativity, to help generate and shape the content we discover on the page. For some, this kind of process might feel too restrictive, but especially useful if I am experiencing writer's block.
Seeing memoir in terms of a narrative, and personal essay as written attempt or experience of mental/physical “wandering” allowed me to see the potential in my own work as stemming from a specific tradition which I could then learn from and practice.
In my essay writing process, I might ask myself if am in a space of reflecting or questioning? Where has this story taken me? Where did it start, and where did it wind up? Is it important for the reader to know how I came to the discovery that I did in this essay? Or am I going to immerse them in the story itself? The pieces of our lives we draw inspiration from, what drives our writer's curiosity, will ultimately shape the form of our nonfiction stories.
If you started with a question, and the story reveals all the twists and turns your mind took to arrive at some semblance of an “answer,” then you’ve likely written personal essay. If your story is mostly reflective, tackling a personal moment or experience in your life—digging into that one event in order to understand it's truth, to give it narrative structure and resolution, then you are likely writing a memoir essay.
There are so many books on nonfiction writing and essays specifically, but you can also read them online to learn more about the ways content shapes form in nonfiction writing. You can start by checking out this list on Longreads.
Ruminate! Reflect! Write!
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About Lily Blackburn
Lily is a full time barista and writer living in Portland, Oregon. She studied English and creative writing at Portland State University and is the essay editor at Typehouse Literary Magazine. Her work has been featured in Little Fictions | Big Truths, Night Music Journal, and elsewhere. Find out more on her website lilyblackburn.com or follow her on Instagram @lily_ana_ees.
