[This essay was adapted by the author from her book Naked, Drunk and Writing: Writing Essays and Memoirs for Love and for Money]

For all its charm and sometimes apparent aimlessness, an essay has a skeleton, an underlying structure that makes it work. Often it’s the age-old structure of a story. By “story” I don’t mean “something that happened,” but a story in the formal sense of the term: somebody (in this case, you) wants what they can’t have and tries to get it. The end resolves the problem. Almost every movie, every novel, every short story, has this structure, and no wonder. A story is a world where every character, every action, has meaning and purpose. A story is why we read: it’s life arranged to fill the basic human need that life have purpose, that events lead somewhere, add up to something. A story takes random events and gives them meaning. It takes life and gives it meaning.

An essay that tells a story (called a narrative essay) has these elements:

Character
Problem
Struggle
Epiphany
Resolution

The character is you–which is why we want to know and like you.

You have a problem: you are, say, stranded at home because you don’t have a car.

You struggle to solve your problem. This can be several actions: You take a part-time seamstress job to get the money for a car. You take driving lessons.

Epiphany: You realize something that changes you. For example, you realize you wanted a car so you can leave your husband.

Resolution: You do something that shows you really did change. You get the car anyway, because in your new life you will need a car.

In between these major story elements, we get image and detail, tone, fantasy, memory, style and language and the other elements that draw us into any pleasurable reading experience.

Character
You are the “I” voice of the essay. Cells snapped into something singular when you came along — and that’s what you want to get on the page. It’s not enough to tell us what happened — let us know who it happened to. This is where tone comes in.

 Problem
In an essay that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, my student Marilyn Penland’s problem appears in the first paragraph: “I have hundreds of images of her from our nine years of life together, but the sound of my mother’s voice eludes me.” The middle of the story gives us the only four sentences she can remember her mother speaking. At the end, she realizes that she sounds just like her own mother, and her daughter sounds like her. “I hear my daughter’s voice and know my mother is speaking to me from across the years … I no longer wish I had more words from my mother.”

Struggle
If the beginning (also called a lede, or lead) of your essay describes the problem, then the middle shows you trying to solve it: you try something, you react, and a new obstacle pops up. These two — action, reaction and new obstacle may be repeated several times, depending on the length of the essay and the complexity of the struggle. (If this process is long and complex, you have a memoir.)

Some obstacles will be external: you want a car, but don’t have the money, your husband doesn’t want you to have a car, or you can’t drive. If you stay with purely external obstacles, though, it won’t be as interesting (we can read a how-to article on how to buy a car). The interesting obstacles will be internal: you are afraid of driving because your parents died in an automobile accident. You hesitate because you sense that once you get the car, it will help you steer a course out of your marriage.

Outlining the Essay
Before we go on to epiphany and resolution, let’s look at outlining the essay. It’s a handy way to get a quick sense of where the piece is going, what to put in and what to leave out. You can try to outline it like this:

I wanted _____
I wanted it because (back story) _____(this is where character comes in)
To get it, I _____ (action)
However, something got in my way: (there may be several actions/reactions sequences depending on length) _____
I had to try something different, so I _____
All the time I was thinking that _____
The turning point came when_____
When that happened, I realized _____
Resolution: After that I _____

My student Rita Hargrave, a psychiatrist by day who now carries dance shoes in the trunk of her car, used this exercise to plan an essay on how she got into salsa dancing:

I wanted to go salsa dancing
I wanted it because I was bored and alone and it seemed as good an idea as any.
To get it I headed for a salsa club recommended by a hotel maid.
But some things got in the way: The cab driver did not want to drive to a Latino neighborhood, and once I got there the bartender at the club was hostile, and there were no empty chairs or tables.
So I asked one of the women who was seated with friends if I could use the empty chair.
But I couldn’t dance.
So I told myself not to worry about it.

The turning point came when An elderly man embraced me, danced with me, and I passionately connected with him. When the older man clasped my hand and started dancing with me, I realized that what I really wanted was an emotional and physical connection with a man and to be seen as desirable and seductive, and that I could do that as a salsa dancer.

Resolution: I found the passion and caring that I was searching for in my life. I have been a salsa dancer ever since.
An outline will sketch the story in the order it happened, but an essay doesn’t necessarily have to be written in chronological order (in fact it’s often better to start at a point near the end). A story is a series of events recorded in the order they happened, but a plot is that same story rearranged for maximum effectiveness.

The End/Epiphany
If you’re having trouble with one of your stories, it could be missing an ending. If your story is about buying a house in remote Mono Lake, for example, and you are still torn over whether moving there is a good idea, you can’t yet write an essay with a conclusion. You want to avoid such unresolved, ongoing stories — your conflict with your sister, your penchant for picking the wrong men, your patients with their same old stories.

Try this. Summarizing your story in 200 words or less will help you see if you have an ending or not. Here’s an example:

My father was going to die. I knew that if I didn’t confront him with all these angry feelings I had that I would be stuck with them after he died. I confronted him at his house in Minneapolis, MN, told him how angry I was at him, and threw a Polaroid camera on the floor. He was amazed. Not mad — amazed that I felt that way. He had no idea. I felt much freer after that. AND THEN…he didn’t die. So we had around ten years after that in which we had a nice relationship with most of the baggage just dropped overboard…

The end of the essay must in some way resolve the problem brought up in the beginning. Since the problem will be internal — the narrator in conflict with herself or himself at least as much as with outside forces — the solution will be internal too. The solution won’t be getting the car. It will be deciding to get the car.

You can think of the essay in its simplest terms as problem-solution.

Problem: My husband makes unrealistic marital demands (clean house, sex four times a week, wife stay in shape) one month before the wedding.
Solution: I realize that his demands are the result of cold feet and marry him anyway.

Problem: I hate the large, ugly dining room furniture my mother insists on hauling from small apartment to small apartment.
Solution: One day while dusting the French sideboard I see how it forms a link to our family’s story.

In an essay, the solution is the moment of change that’s called an epiphany. This was James Joyce’s word for the moment where things change irrevocably in a flood of new understanding. Magazines, more prosaically, call it the payoff, or the take-home point. The epiphany is what turns a mere story — or what might have remained an anecdote — into an essay.

You may have heard teachers stress that the point of an essay is to show, but showing is not enough. The reader knows you actually lived through the experience you’re describing — he expects you to understand what happened and have reflected on what it meant.

The epiphany transforms your story from a window into your life into a mirror where the reader sees himself. You can test this out: If you write a piece about your mother, and your reader starts talking about her mom, the piece works. I often wrote columns about my wreck of a dad living in a truck in the Mohave Desert. If someone came up to me at a party and started to talk to me about my father, I’d be embarrassed. Was I writing a soap opera? But if someone read the column and then told me about how he flew across the country to see his 87-year-old father, how the two of them sat up late, drinking scotch, and that he blurted out to his dad, “I think I came here to tell you I love you,” and then burst into tears — then I’d know the column worked.

Writing the Epiphany
There are two kinds of epiphany. An implicit epiphany shows us the change wordlessly. This kind is what you see in fiction, and especially in movies, which can only show, not tell. In the scene at the end of “The Paper Chase,” Timothy Bottoms, after sweating through a year of Harvard law school, even taking a motel room to cram for finals, doesn’t even open his grades when they come, but throws the envelope into the waves: we get it that he no longer cares about his law-school grades.

An explicit epiphany, on the other hand, spells out the realization, as in this piece by a woman who lost her parents when as an infant she was thrown from the car that killed them both:

We were together for only a few months, I want to tell them, but I am grateful for what memories I can collect, even if they are secondhand. Looking at you now from across the years may not tell me what kind of family we might have been, but it reminds me to treasure the life I’ve made, even if I was not the fairy tale princess I once imagined myself to be.

Make it Universal
Draw back from a piece now and then and ask yourself: What am I saying about human nature, about how we all are? What transforms this story from being about me getting arrested at 16 to being about all of us? The epiphany must have meaning for other people, which means it must be some degree universal. The topics that are not universal (about you, yes, but not about us) include fame, riches, and, unfortunately, writing. When I gave my boss at the paper a piece on being a columnist, she said, “Ok, but you can do that only once in your career.” Being a columnist is not universal.

Neither are psychological explanations:
“I realized my father didn’t love me.”
That’s about your father.
“I realized I had been deluding myself into thinking my father loved me, because I needed him to.”
That’s an insight that could have meaning for the rest of us, who may have done that too.

It doesn’t take much to tilt a piece in the direction of the universal. In a column about growing up poor, I said, “But then the poor are always putting on airs. We Daly kids with our Bargain Box rags looked down on the Wilson kids with their indoor plumbing and on our own cousins because they had a television set. If we couldn’t rise, then it was necessary for others to fall.” The phrase, “but then the poor are always putting on airs” was enough to make this a more universal piece about being poor in America.

Show The Moment Of Change and What Led to It
The reader wants to be there with you, experiencing the change with you. A student of mine wrote a pretty good piece about how time is getting away from her: the microwave clock ticks too fast, her daughter is turning 10, she’s turning 35, and her husband has cancer. Then on the last page, she says, “So I’ve decided to make peace with the passage of time. I’m going to stop letting it beat me up when it’s already got my attention.”

It’s a good epiphany. But what made her go from being someone hyper-aware of the manically ticking microwave to someone feeling peaceful, maybe sitting quietly in a rocker on the porch? The piece needs the transforming moment, the event that changed her.

If, for example, you decide to leave your husband and go into hiding with your child, saying, “I decided I should take off that night,” isn’t enough for such a crucial turning point. Give us a scene in which you make your decision — when you see the court document awarding the abusive father full custody, or hear your child say that he never gets enough to eat at his dad’s.

This is how essay writers and memoir writers take the chaos of life and turn it into art — by letting us be there when a change happens.

Try this:

1. Choose a story about a personal experience that changed you.
2. Show us how you were before the epiphany
3. Show us the transforming moment
4. Write an explicit or implicit epiphany
5. Resolution: show us what you do differently afterward as a result of the epiphany

Work Backward from the Epiphany
Choose topics in the first place by finding the turning points in your life. That gives you your structure, because once you know your epiphany, you know how to write the essay: by starting with you as you were before the epiphany that will change you. Start by showing us you cowering at heights, end with you diving off a rock.

Let’s consider a change that happened to John Fogerty, once chief songwriter for Credence Clearwater Revival. He was so bitter about signing away the rights to many of his songs (including “Born on the Bayou,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” and “Proud Mary”) to Fantasy Records that for years he refused to sing the songs at his appearances. Then one day he visited the Mississippi grave of legendary bluesman Robert Johnson. He stared at the name etched in stone and found himself wondering who owned Johnson’s songs now. He thought to himself, It doesn’t matter. Johnson owns those songs. At that moment, Fogerty realized he, too, was the spiritual owner of his songs. If he wrote an essay, that moment in the graveyard would come near the end. The resolution (what the narrator does differently as a result of the epiphany) would be that he starts singing his own songs again.

If he ends by playing his songs again, he might begin with the first day he refused to sing any of them at a performance. If you know the end, start with the opposite.

Where to Put the Epiphany
The whole essay aims itself at the epiphany. It must occur close to the end, because once it happens, you’re about done. This is why you often find the epiphany in the next to the last paragraph of a piece.

It’s sometimes followed by a more lighthearted ending to bring things back to a less portentous vein. In the last paragraph of the ice-skating piece, Martin dives back into the story and lightens the mood: “My coach bellows across the ice, ‘You call that speed?’ My dead grandmother can move faster!’ ”

Resolution
Then there’s resolution. Often in the last paragraph, after the epiphany, we’ll see the narrator do something he would not have done before the epiphany. Noah Lukeman said in The Plot Thickens, “A character can feel remorse, and think kind thoughts, and have a powerful self-realization, but at the end of the day, when it comes time to make a judgment on this person, we are left only with the trail of his actions, like dots on a map. Indeed, one would even argue that a realization is not a true realization if it is not followed by action.” In other words, life-changing realizations must change lives.

If you realize your boyfriend’s a jerk but go on seeing him, you may have had a genuine epiphany, but we’d be more convinced of that if we see you dump him. If you realize that your mother is never going to change and decide to accept her as she is, let’s maybe have a little scene where your behavior changes: where you don’t bristle when she tells you you’ll never succeed at anything. Maybe you are detached enough to joke about setting up your homeless tent in her backyard.

This is not essential — many fine essays omit that final event showing resolution — but it sure is nice.

I remember a moment that changed my own life forever. I was 31 and had been married for seven years. I was hurrying home from the library to meet my husband Jim at home so we could take our three-year-old son Patrick to the doctor. We’d moved to Petaluma, forty miles north of San Francisco, when Jim bought a country house to restore as an inn. We missed the city after three years and came back, but by then the marriage was over, thanks to that moment.

When I stopped at a light near the little green park in the center of downtown Petaluma, a series of images filled my head: a stormy night, a knock on the door. I open it to a highway patrolman with rain dripping off his hat above his shadowed face. He tells me, “It happened so fast — nothing anybody could do — he died instantly.” He means Jim.

A pickup behind me honked, and I came out of my reverie to see the light was green. As I drove on, I realized I’d been fantasizing the death of my husband — and not for the first time.

I had to switch off the radio to let my next thought fill my head. He doesn’t have to die. I can leave him. I had never thought that before. I had put my unhappiness down to other causes. I entered the intersection as a young married woman heading home to meet her husband. I left it well on my way to being single.

I might end the story by saying that the following night I asked my husband out for a drink and told him I wanted a divorce. That would make a satisfying resolution, and has the additional benefit of being true.