I’m reading over 70 personal essays about rich human experience. The essays that came to us as entries in our contest are having a great impact on me. As I read, I move among countries, among ages, among decades and among social groups. I learn about topics new to me and revisit familiar ones with a new lens. When I awake in the morning, it is only moments before I am thinking of particular situations I was reading about the night before, only moments before I am moved again by a particular author’s insights and resolutions or unresolved feelings. It is as if I have a large group of intimate friends for whom I am rooting, with whom I am standing by during life’s difficult times, and from whom I am learning. In all this reading, my overwhelming feeling is one of gratitude for being able to witness the strength with which people live their lives, describe loss, understand their minds and hearts and make meaning.

Of course, the hard work for me will be choosing the winners. However, in one sense, all who write and share their writing are already winners–they have taken the time to articulate their experience and they have conjured the courage to allow themselves to be heard. Writing intimately requires this and leads to authenticity and satisfaction, centeredness and even peace. Sometimes, as writers we don’t quite get there, though. A finished essay must allow the reader to feel not only the writer creating the space for knowing but insight and wisdom coming into that space. As a reader of personal essays, sometimes I get to be in the presence of a person who is in the vicinity of finding deep knowing, of finishing the creation of that space, of noticing what is arriving, and I appreciate hearing about the journey. Other times, I am witness not only to the creation of that space which knowing may enter, but witness to the actual moment of the truth-finding or fully evoked human experience. Those are peak moments for me as a reader.

As I change my role from devoted friend of the essay and its speaker to contest entry judge, I do not judge any essay lesser, only think that some essays need revision to carve the necessary space for insight to arrive, and some need pruning to clear the brush from the space that is there. I track the way I resonate with the essays in which an author has found a way to carve that space, include me in the creation and then allow us both to witness the moment of discovery. This happens when through my senses, I am deeply moved to laughter, tears, silence or affirmation, when I need nothing more that the essay’s speaker has given me to witness insight arising, a portrayal of the human condition leaping from the page.

Sometimes I explain it this way: When a piece of writing makes full contact with a reader, it has developed to the place where it has made its deepest contact with the writer. One person called the personal essay a two-way mirror–when the reader fully receives the experience the writer sees it with new eyes. I know how amazing it is that this can be true over distance and even time, but literary conversations are like that. We write so that someone, somewhere will understand what we have been through, what we have discovered, what we have seen, what we believe we know. And when we are chosen for publication or a prize, we know that we have succeeded.

I believe the finished, successful personal essay is difficult to craft but rewarding work to keep at. I believe that a not-quite-completely-successful personal essay can inform us as authors and others who read the essay, but the full impact of the life experience, the full living of it twice in reflection, the full weight of its insight, whether painful or humorous is not yet there. When the person outside of the writer wants to read every word and is moved in the same way as the writer is now moved having lived the experience twice, intimacy joins them together from on either side of the two-way mirror.

 While I am still reading the contest entries, I want to share more thoughts on personal essay writing. The ideas and tips I include are gleaned from my own experiences with my motivations for writing and with drafting and rewriting, working in writer’s groups, learning from teachers and keeping at the work even when I don’t know where I am going with it. I have written versions of what follows in my books on writing and for articles on writing, but it seems timely this week as I read what so many of you have taken the time to put on the page.

A cardinal rule for me is this one: Remember that just as people dream their own dreams, they live their own experience. Personal essayists must write what their “I” sees, hears, tastes, touches and smells. Only when we use images that appeal to the senses can we tell personal stories in a way that allows us to fully re-experience them and, therefore, pass them on to readers. There is “no intelligence but in things,” the poet William Carlos Williams wrote; I believe this is a way of saying that images impart wisdom.

A second notion of importance to me is this: To satisfy readers, the personal essayist must, though the specifics that appeal to the senses, reach new insight and new levels of feeling. It works this way, to quote Robert Frost: “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.” So many times, the personal essays I am working on and ones I’ve read veer from making discoveries and begin to report rather than evoke feeling. I think the reason is almost always an encounter with fear.

Thinking about my own process and talking with others, I have identified four fears authors succumb to while attempting the personal essay, fears that endanger their ability to reach and impart felt experience and insight:

• fear of offending others with a personal point of view,
• fear of not having enough interesting experience and insight,
• fear of not being up to the task of exploring experience and
• fear of saying “I.”

The basis of a remedy for overcoming these fears is to:

1. affirm that hunger for self-knowledge drives us to write despite our fears and is more important than what others think of us,
2. believe that since it is the writing itself that leads to insight, we can become used to starting in a state of unknowing to let the writing lead us to whatever memories we require,
3. trust in the power of words to convey experience rather than judge ourselves inadequate for the task of writing our personal experience, and
4. remember we are the filter for all that we see, hear, taste, touch and smell so using “I” in our writing is an honest and necessary gesture.

How do successful personal essayists do this? First, I think they tune into questions that have an emotional charge for them. For instance, my mother, who had been recovering from an operation and was on medication, asked my pregnant daughter if there was a way to test if a woman is carrying triplets. This question was my mother’s response to a short discussion my daughter and my husband had about a man who is one of a set of triplets. I noted my mother’s question and her inability to track the conversation. Later, realizing the exchange had opened up my concern about my mother’s aging in general, I sat down to write a personal essay to answer the question, “What effect is my mother’s aging having on me?” Aging must mean “behind the times to me,” because I quickly remembered times during my growing up where I felt the discrepancy between my world and my mother’s: her wanting to create dance cards for my sweet sixteen birthday party, for instance, and her thinking that I needed quite an extensive wardrobe to leave for college in the 60’s, when all I was going to wear were jeans and sweaters, her more recent discomfort until asked people in the booth in front of us to move their coats draped over one side of our booth even though they weren’t in our way because “it isn’t right.” What began as an inquiry about the effect of my mother’s aging on me seems like it might become an essay evoking my mother and our relationship, a coming to terms so it is rightly evoked as I see it now as opposed to how I saw it at earlier times in my life.

Second, successful personal essayists have to answer another question, “Why now, why is the speaker in the essay writing this essay now?” It is an answer the writer needs to make the work focused and compelling. Why would I be writing the essay now? Maybe I could write as if we had just came home from that restaurant and that booth and I am feeling sad that I didn’t ask the people to move their coats. Why am I feeling sad? I will write to find out.

As soon as I start to write the essay, I will probably begin worrying, “What if my mother reads it? Will she disagree with me? Be embarrassed?” I ask these questions reflexively, even though I know that if the essay is strong enough in me, I will write it no matter the answers. But I also know that the fear of not being liked for what I write can make me hesitate when I am drafting, can force me not to reveal what the essay requires me to reveal. How many times have I taken a draft to writing group and had the members ask for information that I’d intentionally left out? How many times did my inner voice say, “Really, you think I have to include that?” knowing they were right and I was just trying to avoid being judged by my family by leaving things out.

When writing from personal experience, we must teach ourselves to hold our questions about the impact of our essays until we have finished them. Our first allegiance is to the discovery process and to writing the essay. When the essay is complete, we are the ones who decide if we want to publish it. When we are satisfied with a finished piece of writing, we usually feel freer to pursue its publication. The people that we worry we might be offending are often not the actual audience for our work; if they are, they often find our truth rewarding. The personal essay is a sharing of our insides with another’s insides, and to quote Edward Hirsh on lyrical writing, it “speaks out of a solitude to a solitude” and is “a highly concentrated and passionate form of communication between strangers.” Most people, even those we have written about, respond to this with caring and delight. I think my mother would be thrilled that I remembered my childhood, and I am sure my description of how I felt sitting in that booth would make her smile.

As personal essayists, when we aren’t worrying about offending people with our writing, we worry we don’t have anything of interest to say. But we don’t really need an earth-shattering narrative to write the personal essay. Robert Atwan, founding editor of the annual Best American Essays series from Houghton Mifflin, said in a 1995 interview in Poets and Writers:

Someone can go around the world and write a boring essay, and someone like Henry Thoreau could walk a mile in Concord and write a fascinating essay. What makes an essay of quality is thought and reflection.

In addition to wondering what others will think and feel when they read our work, we also worry if we are up to the task ahead. Therefore, I combine Atwan’s notion with my favorite words from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

…trust in the small Things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable… love…what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become … more coherent…

In the movie “City of Angels,” the main character, an angel incarnated as a human, lacks the ability to taste and to smell. He asks his beloved to describe the flavor of the pear she is eating. She says something like, “Oh, you know, it tastes like a pear.” And he says something like, “I want to know what a pear tastes like to you.” This sort of attention and belief that what the pear tastes like to you matters, is love of what is humble, distinct, human, and individual all at once. This is the quality that makes writing matter.

But it is also possible to over describe and dull the evocation of emotions with an unnecessary clutter of information. In rewriting, we get to sort out which images carry emotional weight and build momentum and which are impeding that momentum and keeping the writer from moving forward into the exploration of her experience. Writing groups are really good for helping writers figure this out. As first readers, they can report where they are feeling slowed down and where the material, no matter how beautifully written, isn’t bringing them forward emotional or intellectually. Here are four questions I propose you ask those who are reading your early drafts:

1. What words and phrases remain memorable after you’ve heard my essay?
2. What feelings do you experience from hearing or reading my essay that you think are intended?
3. What feelings do you have that interfere with the ones the essay is going for? Where in the draft does that happen?
4. Where are you curious to know more? All responders, those who know the situation and those who don’t, will usually want to see more than you’ve given them. The ones who were there and know the situation you are writing about may have memories that will be useful to you; they may also wish for you to include things they remember only because they were left out of your account. Responders who don’t know the situation may be so interested in you or what you have on the page so far, that they think they want to know much more than the essay ultimately will require. There is magic in having these responses, though. In adding in information that will satisfy some of their curiosities, you usually redirect the readers’ attention and in final versions, they no longer think they need to know more.

If you listen to responses to these four questions, you will have a great head start every time you start a revision. You will find it easier to shape your essay for finding and communicating insight.

When you rewrite, be sensitive to your experience and to the responses you are getting. If what you wanted to say was misinterpreted or not picked up, you’ll find a way to be sure the experience is in there. Sometimes, readers are smarter than you are–they see what the writing says and what it says is amazing and you can run with it. For instance, a student of mine thought she was writing a piece putting herself down for being a clutterer and promising herself (and the world) she would do better. When I read the piece, cluttering sounded delicious as she described it–maybe not PC but wonderfully rich. My response was that I enjoyed the clutter and the connections she could make by looking at the things around her. Originally, the author had a statement in her work about doing as the anti-clutter movement says should be done. After my response as well as the whole groups’, she came across an article in the NY Times that said, “Studies are piling up that show that messy desks are the vivid signatures of people with creative, limber minds (who reap higher salaries than those with neat “office landscapes”) and that messy closet owners are probably better parents and nicer and cooler than their tidier counterparts.

This is a good illustration of the process of bringing an essay to successful completion: write and show your writing to trusted readers and if you listen with a writer’s ear, their responses will help you find your deepest truths.

Many of my writing teachers passed on the famous Robert Frost quote, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader; no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader” as, “No discovery in the writer, no discovery in the reader.” When your essay moves you, and you seek to find out what the reader needs to know to be moved as well, you end up working toward a discovery within the experience you think you already knew well. As personal essayists, we work our way through the uncomfortably messy stages of “not knowing” and work very hard to catapult ourselves, via our words, into new territory. When we are done, the beautiful web of our thinking and associations glistens, all that clarity and pattern there for the finding from the very beginning.

It is with real pleasure that I dive back into the pile of contest entries and sort out the winners because I know they will be pleased and hopefully will offer their work to us for publication as examples of having successfully shaped experience for the page to inform many others and as well as themselves.

Some Resources
To get a feel for contemporary personal essays, read collections and literary reviews. Pay attention to the imagery, leaps of association and patterns of organization. The following online magazines publish personal essays (and Tiny-Lights publishes a print version of longer essays):

Brevity: Concise Literary Nonfiction
Drunken Boat
Tiny-Lights: A journal of personal narrative

Print anthologies of excellent essays include Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Essays series, W.W. Norton’s In Short and In Brief and Penguin’s One Hundred Great Essays.

For more information about forms of the personal essay and exercises for generating personal essays, as well as sample personal essays that succeed, see my book Writing and Publishing Personal Essays from Silver Threads, San Diego and McGraw-Hill’s Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola.