Writing the Personal Essay

In this first week we’ll consider some of the questions that commonly arise while writing personal essays: What should you do when you can’t remember certain details from your past? How do you handle conflicting reports of the same event? How much can you embellish before your nonfiction becomes fiction? We’ll also discuss some practicalities, such as how to create a personal writing schedule and how to choose an essay topic for the class. You will complete a short writing assignment to share with the class.

This week we will jump into the writing process with a close look at the powers of detail and description in writing. We’ll discuss which types of details make the most impact on a reader, how to create descriptions that are accurate and evocative, and other skills. You will have an optional writing exercise.

Many people think of memoir as a type of writing that doesn’t require any research—one simply writes down one’s memories, and everything is taken care of. But research can be a crucial tool in filling in detail, clarifying doubts, or adding a new perspective to a personal essay. In this week we’ll discuss methods for finding information about events that are long past, interviewing friends and family who may have a different perspective, and other related topics. You will have an optional writing exercise.

Personal essays that deal with ongoing events or long spans of time can be particularly challenging because it’s difficult to know which episodes are most essential to the story. During this week we’ll consider how best to handle this dilemma, and also look at ways to compress several events—or several characters—into one. In addition, we’ll consider those instances where it pays to spend extra time on a particular scene, and how both expansion and compression fit into the larger narrative structure of an essay. You will have an optional writing exercise.

Personal essays are often written with a straightforward narrative structure: a story is told, starting at the beginning and working toward the end. But experimenting with the chronology of events in an essay, or taking on an unusual form that reflects the essay’s main themes, can be a powerful tool for catching and holding the reader’s interest, or affecting the reader’s perception of the events being described. In this class we’ll explore several possibilities for structure. You will write an essay using the skills from Weeks 7, 8, and 9 and submit it to the instructor (and, if desired, for Peer Critiques).

During this final week we’ll consider revision on the micro level. How can we improve an essay sentence by sentence, or even word by word? How can we best identify our individual weaknesses as writers and address them? We will discuss specific techniques for producing more powerful and graceful prose, as well as ways to edit a piece of writing to fit a particular length requirement.