4 Ways to Further Develop Your Personal Essay
“Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?” - Kurt Vonnegut.
Kurt Vonnegut did not dance around saying hard truths. Born in 1922, his career spanned over fifty years, and he is often remembered for his outspokenness about political and moral issues and the importance of art.
I like his quote above for what it hints at; writing for our freedom and seeking truth through our work. I’m also drawn to Anne Lamott when she says:
“Good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are.”
The personal essay is the quintessential form for exploring these truths and better understanding who we are in connection with our fellow humans. I’ve yet to read a personal essay collection where I didn’t find at least one strong link to what the writer wrote about and my own lived experiences. There’s a unique beauty in feeling seen in this way.
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with writing personal essays for some time. I love finding those connections, but there is also a fear of writing these pieces. When we go deep into our personal lives to write, we inevitably make ourselves vulnerable.
Not everything we write needs to be made available for public consumption and it is important to focus first and foremost on ensuring you explore how ‘exposing’ certain parts of your life will make you feel in the long-term. But there is also a magic to a well crafted personal essay - for both the writer and the reader - when it feels like a truth has finally made its way into the world.
I’ve begun to discover a deeper love for the personal essay and writing more about the things that matter to me. As well as carving out my own experience, I’m finding joy in pulling these pieces together, in how I connect them to broader themes, and exploring other writing about the topics I’m drawn to.
Here are a few things that have helped me in recent years to develop the art of my personal essays further.
Go to the Heart and Start From There
“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the centre of your work. Write straight into the emotional centre of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.” - Anne Lamott.
The hardest part for me is deciding what it is exactly I want to write about. I might come up with a series of experiences and feel a pulsing desire to write about them - but I need to go deeper. If one or two specific experiences are dogging me, there’s likely something at the heart of those experiences, beneath the surface that needs excavating. As Lamott advises, I write towards that heart - towards that centre. It’s often messy, and that’s okay! This isn’t about writing perfectly - it’s about writing.
I write and write until I find that heart, and then I start from there.
Uncover Your Themes
“There is so much outside the false cloister of private experience; and when you write, you do the work of connecting that terrible privacy to everything beyond it.” - Leslie Jamison.
Writing about your own life and experience is one thing, but the reader needs to see how it can help them expand. They also need to know why they should care. Personal essays can be tricky, by the name alone there’s a thought that they shouldn’t need to go any deeper than what we (the writer) might have to say, but they’re about so much more. When writing towards the heart of your experience, consider the themes it touches on. Which ones matter? Which ones do you want to expand? Why should the reader care?
Build Your Blocks
“A writer paradoxically seeks the truth and tells lies every step of the way. It's a lie if you make something up. But you make it up in the name of the truth, and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.” - Anne Lamott.
Creating outlines for my work is something I’ve typically been lazy at, but I’ve found the more I implement this technique, the better my work is. It helps me formulate what I want to say and a little around how I’m going to tell it. Outlines help me to identify any gaps in my writing. In putting the blocks in place, it becomes apparent what might be missing in how I’m going to connect all these points eventually. It also helps me decide what I might need to cut and what I should spend more time with.
Write Your Why
“Just as a good lead hooks readers and draws them along for the ride, a good conclusion releases them from your essay’s thrall with a frisson of pleasure, agreement, passion or some other sense of completion. Circling back to your lead in your conclusion is one way to give readers that full-circle sense.” - Tom Bentley.
Coming back to the idea of expanding your reader, conclusions are key within a personal essay. Claiming this as a ‘conclusion’ feels a little academic for me, so I prefer to call it ‘writing my why’. Why have I written this piece? What am I hoping to leave the reader with? What connection am I seeking out? What truth am I telling and how am I landing there?
Writing your why is a vital piece of the personal essay puzzle.
One thing I’ve learnt about writing personal essays is that if it begins to feel like dragging myself through mud, if the resistance to write about the thing I’m trying to pin down is overpowering - leave it alone.
Writing about the personal should be freeing and if it doesn’t feel that way in the process, it might not be the right time to write about it. I’ve read some essays where this felt really obvious to me, that the writing and sharing had come too soon for the writer. Just as we don’t have to write to share, we also don’t have to write about something if we’re not ready.
Let it heal, come back in a few months or years, try to find the heart again and begin.
“It is all life. It is all unavoidable. It is all better than its opposite. Enjoy it while you can.” - Zadie Smith
