Goldilocks and the Art of the Personal Essay
So, one of the best things about my job is reading personal essay submissions. I love having people share bits of their lives and thought–it really feels like an honor to be trusted with personal writing. There are few things that I find more frustrating, though, than a really wonderful story or idea embedded in a bad essay.
One problem I’m running across often is the failure to find some midpoint between narration and preaching, between anecdote and position paper. Lots of times people submit as “essays” pieces that are simply short stories that happen to be true. I like reading them, occasionally I’d consider publishing a particularly well-written one, but usually I want more. I want the anecdote to do some work, to help make sense of some problem that transcends a particular episode in the author’s life.
The opposite problem, of course, is just as bad–abstractions wrenched from their context in a particular life end up sounding preachy or just plain boring.
I think I do a decent job of recognizing when someone has gotten it “just right,” but I’m often unsure of how to advise someone to revise to get from sermon or anecdote to essay. Do you all have practical advice? Or a really good theory of the essay that makes it all clear?
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December 18th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Okay, here’s a great excerpt from Janet Burroway’s _Imaginative Writing_ where she describes the difference between a memoir and the personal essay. She says:
“Creative nonfiction encompasses two sorts of essay that differ more in emphasis than in kind: memoir and the personal essay. A memoir is a story retrieved from the writer’s memory, with the writer as protagonist–the *I* remembering and commenting on the events described in the essay. Memoir tends to place the emphasis on story, and the ‘point’ is likely to emerge, as it does in fiction, largely from the events and characters themselves, rather than through the author’s speculation or reflection.
“The personal essay also usually has its origin in something that has happened in the writer’s life, but it may be something that happened yesterday afternoon, or it may represent an area of interest deliberately explored, and it is likely to give rise to an interpretation of or a meditation on some subject that the experience suggests.
“The success of your essay may very well depend on whether you achieve a balance between the imaginative and the reflective. Often, the story and its drama (the showing) will fill most of the sentences–that is what keeps a reader reading–and the startling or revelatory or thoughtful nature of your insights (the telling) will usually occupy less space. . . . This doesn’t mean that the balance needs to be the same in all essays. On the contrary, a memoir that leaves us with a vivid image of an aging relative or a revelation of an error in judgment may be absolutely appropriate [being presented as a story with little authorial explication], whereas a piece on a walk in the woods may need half its space to analyze and elucidate the discoveries you have made.
“A memoir is a story, and like a story it will describe a journey and a change; it will be written in a scene or scenes; it will characterize through detail and dialogue. The difference is not only that it is based on the facts as your memory can dredge them up, but that you may interpret it for us as you go along or at the end or both: ‘this is what I learned,’ ‘this is how I changed,’ ‘this is how I relate my experience to the experience of the world, and of my readers.’”
*
Okay, that’s more than enough. I just used this text for the first time this semester and when I got to this section I kept thinking “yes, yes, yes!” and my undergrad students weren’t nearly as enthusiastic as I was. Maybe that’s why I just spent 15 minutes typing this out for all of you . . .
December 19th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
“One problem I’m running across often is the failure to find some midpoint between narration and preaching, between anecdote and position paper.”
See this is exactly why I’m not much of a fan of the personal essay. If I want a story, I want a story. If I want an opinion piece, or even better a well-reasoned essay, then I want an essay. And if I want a sermon, then just give me the sermon.
Which is not to say that self-reflection in literary form is a bad thing. I just find that’s it’s very hard to get it to resonate, and when it does, it’s less the use of anecdote and more an engagement with works of art or political issues or reporting.
Or perhaps it’s just that with the advent of blogs, we’re all personal essayists now and the form has become more about the discovery of voice and the building of community than about fine-tuned pieces of writing.
December 19th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
I don’t know about clear practical advice… but I think, with essay writing, analyzing the level of your honesty is always helpful. The two problems you identified in essays are too much narration and too much preaching. Preaching in an essay is a violating of honesty: when you preach, you are attempting to invalidate your reader’s agency, and tell them what to think. You’re not content with plain honest truth.
Too much narration… is also, in its way, a violation of honesty: there’s gotta be a reason to tell the story, and when you don’t analyze your tale at all, or provide it with context and depth, you’re not giving the reader the full experience.
Maybe the last one is a stretch. But I take my essay critical theory from the amazing Tessa Santiago, who quotes Arthur Henry King’s article on how Joseph Smith was one of the greatest writers of all time. Why? Because of his honesty. When you read his account of the First Vision, it’s told in simple language. He’s just telling his story, not trying to persuade or convince or wax lyrical about it. There is power in his honesty.
That’s what I’m going for when I write, what I look for when I read: non-manipulative honesty, and the resulting power.
December 20th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Wm. Morris wrote:
“with the advent of blogs, we’re all personal essayists now and the form has become more about the discovery of voice and the building of community than about fine-tuned pieces of writing.”
Really excellent thought. I was a pretty intense participant in a discussion board a few years ago where I wrote mounds and mounds of these bloggish personal essays. It was a good time for me. As you say, I started to develop a writing voice, and I also learned to cast my life into stories.
However, that writing really wasn’t much good. It served a purpose for me, but it wasn’t good writing.
The essays I’ve published have taken months of my life. Ernest Hemingway’s quote: “Writing is easy. You just sit at the typewriter and bleed” sums up my experience well.
But I’m not really sure how interested people are in reading good personal essays. For one thing, doing so usually takes work. For another, I think people prefer to have a platform to jump off of. They would prefer to read a short reflection on a blog and say, “Hey, that’s kind of like when …” or “That reminds me of…” What follows is rarely good writing. But, as you say William, it functions more as exploration and community-building, which are not bad things at all.
But I think a steady diet of bloggish writing can’t provide people with the sustenance a really fine-tuned piece of writing can.
December 21st, 2008 at 8:54 am
William, NO! Blogging does NOT a personal essayist make!! And the genre has NOT dissolved into some free-form kum-ba-yah jazz odyssey. Don’t you read Segullah?
I agree, though, that blogging has muddied the waters in the minds of would-be writers, and perhaps readers as well. Blogging can be good practice for essay writing in some ways (learning to cast one’s life into stories, as Stephen said so well), but a signficant hindrance in others. I’ve worked with bloggers who are trying to write a bona fide essay for the first time, and they find it very, very difficult. It looks so easy, but imo it’s the most demanding kind of writing, because of the delicate balancing act Kristine described, the oft-painful work of self-examination and expression Emily described, and the complex interplay between one’s own truth and Truth itself. I’ve heard people say it’s easier to write creative non-fiction than fiction because “you don’t have to make up the story.” In my experience, this brings more restriction than it does freedom.
As far as the difference between narrative and essay, I keep one simple rule in mind: personal narrative is non-fiction storytelling for its own sake, personal essay is couched in story but centers on an idea. I have a model for the latter that I’ll post at some point.
December 21st, 2008 at 9:16 am
“William, NO! Blogging does NOT a personal essayist make!!”
Correction: Blogging doesn’t make a personal essayist in the formal form of personal essay championed by those with a love for Didion and Dillard.
My point was that blogging changes the form and in particular changes the form’s relationship with the audience. As I said, it’s much more about finding a voice and building a community of readers (and especially commenters).
It’s no wonder then, that writers who come of age in the era of blogging aren’t going to be well-versed (or even all that interested) in the classic (or at least classic to the latter half of the 20th century) form. I have nothing against the essayist — even personal essayists (although as I state above, I tend to prefer the less-personal school), but it seems to me that it is a form that’s going to be in decline because of the new modes of personal expression that the Internet has brought us.
Which only means, of course, that it’s in good company with poetry and literary novels and theater and the short story.
As far as it being a demanding form of writing. I sometimes wonder if it is unnecessarily so. If one’s life isn’t providing the write material or if the form isn’t providing a natural vessel for the material then perhaps its the form’s fault and not the writer’s. Which isn’t to say that Montaigne wasn’t an amazing writer. I love his stuff. Same goes for Eugene England. And even Didion (most of the time. Less so with Dillard and Lamott).
December 21st, 2008 at 10:09 am
“Less so with Dillard”
I was with you until there–them’s fightin’ words!!
December 21st, 2008 at 11:24 am
I agree with you all about bloggity writing not being good–besides the inherent temptation to skip the requisite editing and revising, blogging introduces what can be a real distorting effect that Wm. hinted at: the immediate feedback loop of audience commentary. It’s very easy to let readers’ comments start to dictate your writing choices. To take my own blogging as an example, I’d like to think that I’m not *quite* as much of a sap as you might think from reading my blog posts, but, at least if you’re as neurotic as I am, you tend to repeat actions for which you have been praised, so it was (and is) easy to fall into the trap of quick and dirty sentimentality. I suspect this would be a problem for me if I did any real writing, too, but the weakness is amplified by the medium of blogging, where the process of essay publishing often introduces critical readers who would more readily save me from my sappy self. A would-be essayist could also, I imagine, be tempted by blogging to engage in too much flowery description, overly gory self-revelation, over-the-top polemical rhetoric, etc. Maybe blogging is useful as training for essay-writing because it makes your worst flaws more apparent!
December 21st, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Well said, Kristine. Yes, yes, and yes.
William, I agree that the genre is being transformed with the advent of blogging, but I certainly don’t think the two are synonymous, even with your qualifying statement. A blogger may be an essayist, but not necessarily so, and I think the duality is relatively rare.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:45 pm
“Maybe blogging is useful as training for essay-writing because it makes your worst flaws more apparent!”
This is operating under the assumption that the personal essay form, narrowly defined in American literature as it has been, is a higher form of expression of personal experience. I’m not convinced that it is. Or rather, I’m not convinced that the way it tries to communicate is any better than blogging. That is, I don’t that what it gives up in immediacy, it gains in the weeks (or months) it takes to fabricate the experience.
This gets back to what Kristine says in the original post:
“I want the anecdote to do some work, to help make sense of some problem that transcends a particular episode in the author’s life.”
The work that we’re expecting the episode to do carries with it expectations that have been accreted codified by a thousand comp teachers and magazine editors. And in many ways, it’s a particularly American thing — one that was amplified by gonzo journalism and therapeutic discourse (and that has its roots in Thoreau [ick]). Other national literatures are much more open to anecdotes and feuilletons and epigrams and philosophical essays.
But again, this is just my personal opinion. I’m much more willing to make a crown of fiction. I can’t fault those who want do the same with the personal essay. Just be warned that blogging and microblogging is radically changing the essay. Just as film has radically changed fiction.
December 21st, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Is it a peculiarly American thing to valorize writing that is difficult to do? Are we attached to a particularly laborious notion of writing? Is this some homegrown antagonist to the Romantic artiste (who might resemble Stephen’s Writing Genius) spinning out fluffy fragments?
December 21st, 2008 at 3:37 pm
You really don’t think that personal essay writing is a higher form of expression than blogging? Really?
That renders me speechless. Almost.
December 21st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Really. There’s no doubt that the personal essay (narrowly defined) is a higher form of artistic achievement. But that shouldn’t be the only thing that matters. Which is why I framed it in terms of expression and communication rather than form. I’m not anti-form. But form is only good so far as it is a generative structure.
And when it comes to Mormon letters, in particular, I’m not convinced of the wisdom of chasing to catch up with the calcifying forms valued by the academy. I hope that the essay, and especially the Mormon essay, is able to renew itself in the face of the challenges posed by blogging, microblogging, podcasting, videoblogging, etc.
Which is to say, that if we take the attitude of bloggers as being personal essayists in embryo whereas we are the fully formed thing, I don’t know that it gets us very far. Or at least no further than where the personal essay has already taken us.
Of course, I could be completely, utterly wrong. It’s always difficult to play devil’s advocate with something that you personally aren’t very much in to. This discussion would probably be better on my end with poetry.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:43 am
I see blogging as a BYOB form of writing. Someone comes up and says, “You know, I was thinking about this the other day,” and someone chimes in with, “Yeah, that reminds me of,” and someone else says, “In connection with that, did you know that …” And everyone has a wonderful time. It would be as if a scribe recorded the conversations you had with your book group. People crave community, and blogs provide that.
I myself am not a very good blogger. I used to get annoyed about that. I would put together these posts that took me hours to write, going through a number of revisions and second opinions from colleagues, and then it would get like five comments.
I guess I’m old school because, for me, the reason to put writing in front of a lot of people is to say, “Here’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I’ve followed a line of thought (or an experience) through difficult territory. I’ve questioned myself; I’ve made false starts and hit dead ends. It’s taken me some time to find a way out the back of conventional wisdom and maxims to find something that resonates deeply with me. I know that you haven’t had my experience or followed this path, so I’m going to do my utmost to communicate it to you.”
Finding that resonance and then finding a way to communicate it takes quite a lot of work. But I don’t think the end result really invites discussion.
Take Kristine’s post here. It has generated more comments than the majority of my posts put together. Is her post a fine piece of craft, with hard-won insight? Nope, it’s just an idea she threw out there. We provided the rest.
December 22nd, 2008 at 10:57 am
I agree that film has had a huge effect on fiction. However, I’m reluctant to compare film with blogging. For one thing, film is a tremendously time- and work-intensive activity. You think publishing can chew up your life and spit it out, try producing, directing, and distributing a film. Even a crappy one.
While the talent and work of hundreds of people go into producing a film, a blog post takes only one person about an hour (or less) to turn something out. I’d be more comfortable saying that home-made videos affected film the same way blogging will affect the personal essay. Sure, we have stuff like The Blair Witch Project where the shakycam was used to replicate home-video making, and we have Capturing the Freidmans and Mule Skinner Blues that make use of home-made video footage, but in both cases, home-videos have served only as a starting place, or a chord to riff on.
So homemade videos can certainly act as a training ground for future filmmakers, but those videos are never going to replace fllms that actually have time, money and talent put into them. I think blogs and personal essay have the same relationship.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 am
IMO, blogging is the electronic equivalent of writing in a journal.
December 22nd, 2008 at 11:20 am
Wha? Stephen, you think I didn’t spend hours polishing this up?
Actually, I have a rule–I don’t spend more than 30 minutes on blog posts, ever. I do think of it very much as a conversation between friends, rather than publishing essays. Except when I get e-mail from my grandparents’ home teacher or my Beehive adviser who’ve stumbled onto my blog, and I think I really should be a little more circumspect.
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:27 pm
“I think blogs and personal essay have the same relationship.”
My point is not one of craftsmanship. I completely agree with all that’s been said about that here and wish I had some productive answers for Kristine’s initial questions. My point is that if people who kick it old school continue to look down on blogging and try and force bloggers into writing in their own image, they will be sorely disappointed and end up speaking to an ever-narrowing audience. That’s totally not what Kristine is asking for, and I’m sorry to throw the discussion off track, but the subtext I was picking up was something that I think it’s good to address.
Also: YouTube has or may soon damage crafted film as well. But my point about film/TV is not whether they or crafted or not, but that they savaged the reading of crafted writing, especially fiction.
I think this CJR interview with Clay Shirkey outlines fairly well the context from which I’m speaking.
An excerpt:
“One of the things that I’ve noticed with criticisms of the Internet is that very often they’re displaced criticisms of television. That there are a lot of people, Nick Carr especially is a recent addition to the canon, wringing their hands over the end of literary reading. And they’re laying that at the foot of the Internet. It seems to me, in fact, from the historical record, that the idea of literary reading as a sort of broad and normal activity was done in by television, and it was done in forty years ago.
The funny thing, though, is when television came along, it became, to a degree literally unprecedented in the history of media—not just the dominant media compared to other media, but really the dominant activity in life outside of sleeping and working—that a curious bargain was struck where television still genuflected to the idea of literary reading. The notion was that there was somehow this sacred cathedral of the great books and so forth. It was just that no one actually participated in it, and so it was sort of this kind of Potemkin village. What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people.
Many, many more people are reading and writing now as part of their daily experience. But, because the reading and writing has come back without bringing Tolstoy along with it, the enormity of the historical loss to the literary landscape caused by television is now becoming manifested to everybody. And I think as people are surveying the Internet, a lot of what they’re doing is just shooting the messenger.”
Finally: I think the best solution is to make journals more like blogs and blogs more like journals. Unfortunately that’s a middle ground that’s hard to get to and doesn’t necessarily bring major rewards (AMV being one example).
December 22nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Good points, William.
I too like the fact that the Internet has pushed popular media consumption toward reading and writing.
Another interesting thing is how much more “literate” television seems to be getting recently. (I’m actually not one to speak authoritatively on this subject, as the Direct TV satellite dish on my roof is purely decorative.) There’s still plenty of filler, but we also have some complex, insightful, well-crafted stuff like Mad Men and The Wire. The literature of television.
There is an interesting article in the current New Yorker that argues that the Internet isn’t the enemy of print publications, rather it’s our insistence that we get our writing free. You get what you pay for.
December 22nd, 2008 at 3:04 pm
“You get what you pay for.”
Sure, but is anybody really going to make any money in the world of Mormon letters? Probably not. And in some ways that’s incredibly freeing. It’s a labor of love and our price is our time and we only need enough money in order to keep the thing going. That doesn’t remove all the stress for an organization like Sunstone (but all the more reason to have events like the symposia that you can reasonably charge for as well as coming up with merchandise, premium offerings, compelling pitches to drive fundraising, etc.).
But that’s exactly why I think that the AML should move to an all-online format. Charge $10 a year and your only overhead is hosting costs — and heck maybe you could even pay for some design help. And if you do things right, you also increase your audience and social capital (e.g. get more people involved and invested in the organization) which then may mean decent donations down the line when you have an initiative that would require some extra funding.
————–
Now that I’ve worked some things out of my system, I’ve begun to think more seriously about Kristine’s original question*.
It seems to me that you have to start with the story and not the analysis. So I think that if you can get writers to really focus on the story and hone it a bit, then hopefully the work of doing that will raise the questions that lead to the making sense part. Or at the very least will lead writers to a place where they can start asking those questions. Because of there really isn’t thing to the story, if it can’t be turned in to a compelling piece of storytelling, then I personally don’t think it’s going to be able to support the analytical/poetic/aesthetic demands of creative nonfiction. So I think that’s where you start.
In terms of adding the essay bits, I think the best thing to do is to read essays and find out what sorts of questions essay writers ask and explore and attempt to answer. And that’s what a steady diet of writing and reading blogs interferes with — the work of reading.
* Also: I’ve been incredibly voluble of late because I’ve been home sick from work and church the past four days so I’m also experiencing a bit of cabin fever. Sorry.
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