In 2007, I wrote about the way I judge essays in a contest. As Writing It Real members enter their work for our 2013 Fall contest, I am reposting my thoughts on the judging process. When I judge, I separate judging into three steps and view the roles I take on, first of friend, then of fellow writer, and finally of judge.

Here’s what happens in each step:

Reading as a Friend
To judge a personal essay contest means first to be an interested reader, and to the interested reader, being let in on all manner of human experience is not only mentally pleasurable, it also elicits gratitude and friendship.

“At the core of the personal essay,” Philip Lopate writes, “is the supposition that there is a certain unity to human experience.” As essayists, in talking about ourselves, we are in some way talking about everyone. It is our experience that matters and our interest in sharing it that moves others. Orhan Pamuk, 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature, put it this way in his acceptance speech, “All true literature rises form this childish, hopeful certainty that we resemble one another.”

The personal essay always has an air of intimacy about it, not only of one person’s insides speaking to another’s, but of one person’s process for delving deeply into his or her own experience using honest inner reflections to find insight and truth, something that comes in experiencing things twice–once in life and once in reflection.

When someone is willing to make me, as reader, a confidant, a witness to his or her striving for authenticity, my response is appreciation, thanks, and emotional indebtedness for doing this work and for trusting me with it. The work then seems to be on my behalf as well as well as on behalf of the author. Holding the information and being open to it, I feel more human, more a part of a whole, more recognized and less lonely. By learning someone else’s center, I feel my own grounding.

 Brain research is now showing us that when we understand what someone else is doing, we do so because our own brains are activated as if we are doing what the other is doing. Reading someone’s experience, even when the essay is not yet fully manifest as literature, awakens experience and reflection and has emotional impact that is very valuable to me.

Reading as a Fellow Writer
After I read as a friend and enjoy the sense of gratitude that washes over me, I must, if I am to choose winners, put on the writer’s hat and re-read. Now I must look at how the writing is working to keep me involved by expanding my knowledge of the speaker’s experience, by settling me down to enter the speaker’s world, and by fully informing me. As I read this way, the shaper in me is activated. I see the ways in which the essay, if it isn’t fully realized, might need a little more to elegantly lift me up from where I am when we start and put me back down on the ground again at the end, completely clear about where I am and wholly aware of what has changed.

I look for the same things as when I am redrafting my own work:

A feeling that I know why the speaker is speaking to me now
If a group of essays were to be published in American Heritage magazine in a special section on writings by individuals who were growing up in the American 20th Century, I would already know why the authors are speaking to me–the magazine editors would have told the readers why they had collected the writing. I would sit down to read, certain that I knew the speaker was speaking to me because the magazine had decided to focus on growing up experiences. If a newspaper asked for descriptions of fathers and mothers for special sections on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, I would read the selected writings knowing I was reading what the editors had asked for and knowing the writers were writing because they were asked. I would settle in to experience many mothers and fathers.

However, in the absence of such an editorial focus, the essay must reveal why the writer is speaking on a particular subject now without the help of an editor’s note. The essay must allow the reader to find out what has urged the writer to speech. The speaker in the essay must create, inside the essay, a compelling occasion for the essay’s particular inquiry into experience. Understanding the reason the writer is writing a particular essay at a particular moment is part of what keeps the reader reading and wanting to absorb experience. The reader experiences a need to know what the writer’s particular baring of the soul will deliver. When the reason or urgency for the inquiry is successfully communicated, the feeling of needing to know the ending is as strong in the reader as the feeling of enjoying the experience presented for experience’s sake.

A sense of a promise and its fulfillment
This is a cousin to knowing why the speaker is speaking now. Every successful essay makes a promise and fulfills it. That the speaker is speaking upon some occasion, with some need and is sitting down to write from this urgency creates a promise that something will be discovered. It isn’t always clear to the writer in first drafts what that promise or discovery is, but the elements become more clear as the drafting process continues. To quote Orhan Pamuk again, “As we hold words in our hands, like stones, sensing the ways in which each is connected to the others, looking at them sometimes from afar, sometimes from very close, caressing them with our fingers and the tips of our pens, weighing them, moving them around, year in and year out, patiently and hopefully, we create new worlds.”

It is creation of the new world that fulfills the promise an essay must make–writing a way toward this new world, the essayist is looking for something and promises to continue looking until that something or another something he or she didn’t even know was there turns up and satisfies, making the search worth it.

A feeling that I am not only a friend to listen, but am entrusted to know the real story
“A writer talks of things that we all know but do not know that we know. To explore this knowledge, and to watch it grow, is a pleasurable thing; the reader visits a world that is at once familiar and miraculous.” That’s from Orhan Pamuk’s speech again. When a piece of writing builds that familiar, but now-miraculous-because-it-was-evoked-so-well world, I feel trusted and known. Not only am I a friend to listen, I am now also a person for whom what is being said will matter. The writer is reaching out toward me because what the writer has to say will fill a “not knowing what I know” in me.

There are things that happen, though, in unfinished drafts that get in the way of this magical transaction between the essay and its reader. Sometimes, unfinished essays skip among aspects of an experience and among points of view, as if the writer is afraid that the reader won’t think the writer is being fair to everyone. These essays end up confusing the reader. Or, the writer may forget to make even a nod to the idea that there is another side at all. The personal essay is known for its self-deprecating humor and attitude, and often, that is what allows the reader to enter the speaker’s one-sided world and feel comfortable there. Without a nod to others or one to the speaker’s being idiosyncratic in some way, the author can unwittingly distance the reader.

It is sometimes hard to make a connection with the reader, as a piece of writing can easily get to be so much about the speaker that the speaker’s subject is obscured or it can easily get to be so much about the subject that we don’t know why the writer is writing about the subject. Those kinds of drafts need more time to cook.

Keeping the reader from feeling entrusted also comes from relying on exposition (telling) when details and images from the scenes would build that familiar-but-now-miraculous world. How much better to experience the moment a person became a writer, or at least decided to be serious about it, than to be told, “I decided to take myself seriously because the writing was gnawing inside.” Wouldn’t it be miraculous to see the way the curtains or drapes hung that day or to hear the phone and have witnessed the speaker ignoring it?

A third way of keeping the reader from feeling entrusted is to use jargon that says how the reader should feel about something rather than using words the writer has put together from the freshness of his or her experience. As I collected source material for my thoughts on essay writing and judging and brought books to my desk, a scrap of newsprint fell out of one of my books this morning, a corner of page 15 of a Seattle publication called Wordscape. I must have quickly ripped it off one day a few years ago to use as a bookmark, because I did not preserve the name of the person whose words are on the fragment or a date, but I see an advertisement for a book that turns out to have been published in 2003. I am pleased to see the words that are on the fragment today as I write about essays: “Let’s be in the avant-garde rather than joining later as back up singers. Let’s eschew those who insist on laying down cliché like Formica between us and their souls. Let’s demand freshness, purity and bone-scraping honesty. ”

If an author is using the general culture’s words to describe his or her feelings and sensations and perceptions, that author must take a second look. Words put together from individual experience make the reader feel specifically entrusted; clichés operate something like an impersonal public invitation to a large group event.

A feeling of enjoying the author’s use of craft
Reading as a writer, after I feel I know why the speaker is speaking to me and what they are searching for and feel entrusted to receive the real story, I want to enjoy the writer’s use of craft. I want to see that what the writer describes reawakens my experience of such an environment, of such objects and people and conversation. I want to be charmed by the speaker’s way of categorizing objects and events, of comparing and contrasting experience, of defining. Applying craft, the author creates a sense of organization for the essay’s description and narration that deepens the speaker’s experience, and thus adds layers of pleasure for the reader. I have hot flashes and here’s what they are like does not offer as pleasurable a read as I have hot flashes and here’s how I categorize them. The human mind is wired to enjoy the creation of “systems of thinking.”

Finding emotional logic in the essay’s examples, images and storytelling
If a speaker sets up a framework–say she says she is going to make a quilt from the images of her past–the essay must stick to the challenge that the speaker set up. If the quilt turns into an afghan or the speaker forgets that the pieces need to be assembled and stitched together, the emotional logic of the metaphorical framework is going to be affected and the reader will become dissatisfied. If a speaker labels people and objects by ethnic group or facial expressions, there has to be a reason inside the essay for the speaker to be noting these differences, and eventually as reader I must learn what it is. It’s a little like the Chekov gun aphorism for writers–“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

On the other side of expectation is surprise. All surprises that come in an essay should be welcome ones to the reader. If a speaker spends two pages successfully evoking how irritating and out of touch someone is by showing how he doesn’t pay attention or listen and then later says that this is the person she loves, a reader is going to be uncomfortably surprised. If the speaker instead began an essay with, “This was the day I realized I couldn’t love him,” she can then write about the irritations and not listening and the reader will be interested to learn more about the writer’s disappointment and her strength in accepting it.

Finding endings that are satisfying and earned
I think that very frequently, a piece of writing leads the writer to discovery and just as they are set to write the ending, a little voice of triumph comes in and says, “It’s easy. Just say this,” and then a paragraph or a sentence with the sound of an affirming ending comes into being. It’s as if that something in the author’s being also says, enough, rest, you have it. They’ll certainly see it, too.

In my case, I know this voice is taking over when I end a piece of writing with an exclamation mark. An editor pointed that out to me. When he did, I realized that I the feeling that prompted the excited exclamation point was an I-think-I-have-it-now-so-I’m-happy feeling. But this feeling does not make for an earned ending. That I-think-I-have-it now thought or feeling merely tells you that you are in the vicinity of your ending. You must still put experience fully on the page so the reader can come along with you.

I think of it this way: If the last thing I have to do when leading others on a hike is cross a stream, seeing the stream is not the end of the hike. I have to ford that stream with the others and reach our destination. I can’t just leave the reader on one side of the stream and wave hello from the other side if we are both to finish the journey together.

When I move from listening as a friend to reading as a writer, I enjoy myself. There is nothing I come across that I haven’t also neglected to fix in my own work at times or often not known how to fix before I send my work to readers. I remember again how hard we must work on our drafts and revisions, but also how beneficial it is share work before it is done, to have the sense that what I am doing is important enough to me that I will share it with others and garner their responses which may help me in bringing the work further along.

Reading as a Contest Judge
Once I have listened to the experience in the essays as a friend and as a writer and enjoyed the ways in which they remind me of all of the elements that must work in tandem for an essay to entirely succeed, the fun part is over for me because I am more comfortable being a teacher than a judge. It is hard for me to put on the judge’s hat and begin separating the essays, which seem to have all became friends and then colleagues, from one another.

In addition to preferring being a listener, I like most to help people bring their writing to fruition. Judging often leaves non-winners feeling hopeless, which is the opposite of what I want to do. So remember: We should never judge ourselves by the fact that we have not won a contest–judging winners is ultimately subjective. There are no fully objective literary standards–different judges, editors and publishers are going to select different winners from any one pool of entries. That’s why publishing is such a big field and accommodates so much writing.

When I wear the judge’s hat, I go for the essays that have given me the most pleasure, no matter the subject. The pleasure in a successful essay may come from crying or laughing or being drawn into a contemplative mood. I may have these pleasures from essays I didn’t select as winners, but I may have felt that in these essays the pleasure was a bit buried in aspects of the draft that do not yet fulfill the writing opportunity at hand.

Judging winners is not about judging experience. In our contest, some entries are about the most painful and difficult of human losses and others are about very small moments in a daily life. Even if I can see how one, two or three drafts from now, a particular non-winning essay will rock many worlds, if there is one that has succeeded with a more modest subject, and I feel I can describe the ways in which that essay came through for me, that one will be the winner this time.

During the month of February, I will be publishing and discussing the first, second, and third place winners as well as one of the honorable mentions.

****

I want to thank all of you who entered our contest and became new subscribers to Writing It Real or extended their subscriptions. And for everyone who entered, regardless of whether they won, I appreciate the opportunity to have read your work.

More resources for those pursuing the writing of personal essays:

The Art of the Personal Essay by Philip Lopate
Writing About Your Life by William Zinsser
In Pieces: An Anthology of Fragmentary Writing edited by Olivia Dresher
Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-five Women Over Forty edited by Kim Barnes and Claire Davis
Farewell, Godspeed: The Greatest Eulogies of Our Time edited by Cyrus M. Copeland
“My Father’s Suitcase,” Orhan Pamuk’s 2006 Nobel Peace Prize in Literature address