Writing a personal essay is a difficult job. If you tell a story to your best friend, they usually know most of the important context about your life. They know where you’re from, the significant hardships you’ve been through, and they likely know the names of important figures in your life. But when a reader stumbles upon a personal essay online, they will often know nothing but the author’s name — if they have even chosen to read that.
In a medium where attention is finite, the challenge for the personal essay writer becomes to deftly insert information about themselves as they work towards their primary message.
Let’s take a look at this intro paragraph from David Sedaris’ essay Hejira.
“It wasn’t anything I had planned on, but at the age of twenty-two, after dropping out of my second college and traveling across the country a few times, I found myself back in Raleigh, living in my parents’ basement. After six months spent waking at noon, getting high, and listening to the same Joni Mitchell record over and over again, I was called by my father into his den and told to get out. He was sitting very formally in a big, comfortable chair behind his desk, and I felt as though he were firing me from the job of being his son.”
In only about 100 words, we have a fairly concrete idea of the author’s age, geography, and life situation. Modern resurgence of the record collecting hobby notwithstanding, the inclusion of details like the Joni Mitchell record gives us an idea of when this story takes place (1970’s). The essay teaches you all of this while priming you for the driving conflict of the piece, Sedaris’ strained relationship with his father.
This is efficient storytelling, and you don’t need to read any of Sedaris’ other essays to, at least subconsciously, pick up on these things.
Sedaris could have easily said, “I found myself back home, living in my parents’ basement.” And it would not have been bad writing to do so. But instead, by saying, “I found myself back in Raleigh, living in my parents’ basement,” Sedaris subtly chips away at the question every reader has at the start of a story: What is going on?
Even if someone doesn’t know a lot about Raleigh, North Carolina, from then on, we as readers don’t wonder where this story is taking place, leaving us more space to focus on what the story is about thematically. These quick personal details are essentially anchor points that ground readers while they explore higher concept ideas.
A problem that can come up for writers when including these details, however, is dwelling on them beyond the scope of the story. Once we learn that we need to provide context about ourselves in each personal essay, it can be easy to balloon up our drafts with endless information about everything we’ve ever gone through.
One major cause for this is ego, which can often make a writer want to fit 100 percent of themselves into every piece. The impulse here is an attempt to minimize the number of people who can misconstrue our intentions. But readers pick up on defensiveness, and it is exhausting to read an essay that tries too hard to justify its own existence.
The solution then is to distribute the attention we give to aspects of our lives based on the unique needs of a story. As writer Phillip Lopate says in The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character, “In one essay you may decide to make a big thing of your religious training and very little of your family background, and in another just the opposite.”
Readers pick up on defensiveness, and it is exhausting to read an essay that tries too hard to justify its own existence.
I like to remind myself that no one story can be about everything, and no one personal essay will be able to capture every facet of my experience. It is important to do our due diligence, and then work towards being comfortable with the fact that we cannot control what every single reader may assume about us from our writing.
Now efficiency is not the end-all goal of storytelling, but seeking the correct personal details is ultimately a question of intentionality. It takes time to learn how to step out of our own heads and view our life details in the context of how they function as narrative tools. Many new writers tend to overdress their scenes with superfluous information. They will describe the color of their bedroom walls or the shape of their trash cans solely to buff out the word count. But good details pull double-duty as some combination of characterization, mood-setting, or contextual support.
The details we select can help readers reach a higher level of engagement with our work. This often requires a good amount of introspection on our parts and is not easy to achieve.
I like to remind myself that no one story can be about everything, and no one personal essay will be able to capture every facet of my experience.
As you explore what it means to illustrate yourself on the page, I caution you to approach that self with care. Writing about ourselves is not only technically challenging but also emotionally. As you learn to use your life details as narrative tools, it is critical to remember that is not all they are.
As it were,
Tell people who you are, but do it with care.
With love,
Jade
Fantastic advice in here, thanks!
I would also add that the unique details of a personal experience that only you could possibly know will make personal stories really shine. I often write about difficult times with my daughter who has cerebral palsy. I try to avoid obvious generalized statements about it and instead get into the specifics about how it made me feel or what I saw in the moment.
For example, I once wrote a sentence like "No parent should ever have to see their child intubated once, let alone twice." While true, literally anyone could write that and no-one would argue with them. It's an obviously true sentence, but there's no emotional weight to it. After receiving feedback from a friend, I changed it to a few sentences describing what it felt like to see a plastic tube shoved down my two-day-old daughter's throat in a chaotic room filled with a half-dozen nurses and doctors barking orders at each other. Most people have no idea what that feels like, but the more specific version will make them feel closer to how I did.
Love that snippet from David Sedaris. I like personal essays and it was a great summation in very few words.