This is Part 1 of Andrea A. Firth’s Personal Essay Masterclass
Today, in Lesson 1, we’re going to look at how to generate ideas for your personal essays and tap into your memory. We’ll use three short essays by Brenda Miller, Sarah Moss and Jill Christman as examples to guide us. The essays are linked here, and you can read them now or as you move through the lesson.
“Swerve” By Brenda Miller
“Generation Gap” by Sarah Moss
“The Sloth” by Jill Christman
About the Readings…to be a good writer, you need to be a good reader. You need to read widely with specific attention to the genre(s) you write. The best way to learn what makes a personal essay good is to read good personal essays. I sourced all of the essays we will read in the course from two outlets: Short Reads and Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction. Both literary magazines publish short (to keep the class load manageable), high-quality personal essays online and for free. Short Reads delivers an essay to your inbox every Wednesday. Brevity publishes three issues a year with 12 or more essays in each. I want to give you an easy and affordable way to continue reading essays after the course is over.
The readings for each lesson will be attached at the top as shown here. The essays will demonstrate the writing craft topic we’ll cover, and they are all great reads! So, if you haven’t already—you will fall in love with the form.
I promised that this would be a personal essay love fest, so let’s go.
Personal Essay—what is it?
Note: Leave your memories of or nightmares about the five-paragraph, analytical essay from high school/college English behind. That’s not our focus.
Personal essay is a vessel for the exploration of our lived experience. A flexible and creative form that aims to find meaning in what we encounter and contemplate in the everyday and beyond. Here’s how the writer Dinty W. Moore1 describes it:
[The personal essayist] takes a topic—virtually any topic under the big yellow sun—and holds it up to the bright light, turning it this way and that, upside and down, studying every perspective, fault, and reflection, in an artful attempt to perceive something fresh and significant.
The great thing about writing personal essay is that it’s about you—what you experience, what you think—something you know a lot about. I love the way the essayist Phillip Lopate describes personal essay as having “a taste for littleness.” He says:
“The personal essayist claims the unique access to the small, humble things in life. And this taste for the miniature becomes a strong suit of the form: the ability to turn anything close at hand into a grand meditational adventure.”2
Let’s look at the ideas—the small humble things—that the writers in today’s Readings explore and expand upon.
“Swerve” by Brenda Miller starts with her memory of the time she ran over a piece of wood while driving. Thunk, thunk, and then the wood spun behind us on the road. But as she layers on details,action, and dialogue the tension builds. Pot in the trunk, a broken brake light, her fear of getting pulled over, and an angry, growling boyfriend. A good scene with conflict. But it doesn’t stop there. The essay grows to be about much more than this one uncomfortable nighttime drive. It leads to a long list of the things she has apologized for, which enables her to evaluate an unhealthy relationship and learn from it.
In personal essay, the writer comes to a recognition, a realization, even an epiphany. Both writer and reader are made to think.
“In Generation Gap,” Sarah Moss describes taking her son, starting at age 10, to a series of Shakespearean plays. A charming and ambitious mother-son activity. At first Moss is dubious about whether this will work out (subtle, internalized conflict). But quickly the play excursions give the duo a new companionship. When another play-goer puts his feet intrusively on the mother’s seat. The son, now 12 and with the voice of a young man, steps in to rectify things. The situation is “small,” the conflict low-key, yet Moss sees something new and significant in how her son has matured.
Jill Christman’s essay, “The Sloth,” starts with a brief scene, a morning swim in Costa Rica, followed by the narrator’s retelling of her encounter with a sloth while in an outdoor shower later that day. Spending time with a full view of the elusive sloth is remarkable in its own way, but there’s no overt conflict inherent to the action here. Christman observes and thinks. She pairs an everyday event, albeit an unusual sighting, with the deeper theme of the essay—her grief.
Let’s look at the events, the small ideas, in these essays and the deeper themes that each explores.
As you can see, a seemingly small event can be an idea for a personal essay and connect in myriad ways to deeper themes. Essays are an opportunity for you to ask and answer questions. Why did I keep apologizing? How did watching plays written over 400 years ago impact my son, me? What did that encounter with a sloth teach me about the loss of my fiancé
To generate ideas, pay attention to the everyday.
A personal essay can be about anything, and the ideas can come from anywhere. Your daily life, the everyday, is a good place to start. Once you have that small idea, a happening that has stuck with you, nudged at your brain or your heart and made you wonder—What was that about?—write it down.
Make a list like I did here (in the table) and try to connect those ideas with questions and themes to explore. You might not know what the essay idea is about right away—that’s ok! If the idea is generative, the connections will come, but it may take time. The exploration is the fun part. You can reverse engineer the essay idea process too. Maybe you know what you want to write about, like a soured relationship, or your son’s coming of age, or the pain of losing a loved one, think about what happened at the time, and make a list of small ideas.
Personal essays are true stories. You can’t lie. You can’t make things up.
But truth can be subjective, and memory can be slippery, hard to pin down. Two people in the same room at the same time will remember what happened differently. Our memories change over time and with every recollection. And we forget things. You must do the best you can to recreate what happens in your narrative truthfully. But, yes, at times you will interpret, and sometimes you may have to speculate—this is what writer Lisa Knopp calls “perhapsing.”
When you don’t recall the facts or important details you need to tell your story well—clearly, roundly, fully—start with the word perhaps. This lets the reader know that what follows isn’t fact but a speculation on the part of the writer. Informed speculation. As a writer you imagine what happened using all that you do know about the narrator and others, the time, the place, the motivations, the desires, the outcomes and more to recreate the event.
Perhaps is one word you can use to speculate. Others include: Maybe. I imagine. It could have been. Here’s a take.
Let’s look at an example from the memoirist Mary Karr.3 When she wanted to write the scene of her saying goodbye to her mother from her youth, but she didn’t remember how it happened, she took an educated, speculative guess.
Mother must have squawked about our leaving. She would have yelled or wept or folded up drunk and sulking. I recall no such scene…The French doors on the scene never swung open…Mother herself was clipped from my memory. She did promise vaguely to come for us soon, but I can’t exactly hear her saying that.
Karr is a pro. She’s up front about what she doesn’t know about this goodbye (everything). But she shares how the scene might have unfolded and details about her mother that inform her speculation and the reader. Great writing craft.
For more examples of the “perhapsing” technique, read Lisa Knop’s craft essay on it here.
Today’s Readings demonstrate how the small can loom large in personal essay and how everyday events can work well as ideas for your essays. In addition, each Reading employs a lot of strong writing craft. I’ll identify a few of the points of craft at work for each essay we read in the course. I describe this exercise as reading like a writer, and doing this will make you a better writer.
You will find additional examples of the craft at work in these Readings. Let us know what you find in the Comments.
“Swerve” by Brenda Miller
Uses what feels like a direct address, or journal entry, or letter as the container for the essay.
Opens in scene with specific, well-chosen details (a piece of wood, a pound of marijuana, a faulty brake light).
Dialogue (verbalized and internalized) provides a strong characterization of the partner and the relationship: And I’m always the one that has to fix it whenever something breaks. …with the brake light you hadn’t fixed blinking on and off,…
Repetition of I’m sorry shows the passage of time, characterizes the narrator, and emphasizes the relationship’s dynamic.
“Generation Gap” by Sarah Moss
Timemarkers keep the reader oriented as the essay moves through time: For a few years; he was about ten; my son was twelve.
Dialogue is spare and selective, chosen to show the child’s maturation. Try me, he said as the essay opens. Thanks mate, we’re good, said my son… as the essay ends.
Watching through his eyes serves as a metaphor for how the narrator comes to understand what her son gleans from the plays.
“The Sloth” by Jill Christman
Uses sensory details—what blood feels like, what the movement of a sloth sounds like.
Varies the syntax with one-, two-, three-word, and compound sentences, which creates rhythm.
Asks a question: What else is this slow?
Written in first-person, I, and moves to second-person, we, metaphorically connecting the narrator and the sloth to support the throughline.
✍️ Reread the short essays “as a writer” and identify other writing craft that you find.
✍️ Brainstorm ideas for a personal essay(s) you want to write. Start with small ideas from your everyday life. Or if you have a big happening you want to tackle—go for it. Make a table and begin to connect your ideas with deeper themes.
✍️Think about an event that you don’t fully remember but feel is important to write about. Speculate. Draft a scene starting with Perhaps or I imagine and recreate what happened.
1 Dinty W. Moore is the founder and Editor in Chief of the journal Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction, which has been publishing the finest of short personal essays (750 words or less) for over twenty years. This quote was sourced from his book, Crafting the Personal Essay, A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (Writer’s Digest Books).
2 The Art of the Personal Essay, An Anthology from the Classic Era to the Present selected and with an Introduction by Phillip Lopate.
3The Art of Memoir by Mary Karr (Harper Perennial).
Hi Harrison. Thanks! And folks--please go to this link and read H's essay--it's great.
1. Wow, you write fast! Loved the flash essay. And, I love Banksy too--saw an exhibit of his work in SF a couple years ago.
2. Sarah Moss will love that you gave a shout to and linked her essay so others can read. Nice way to boost another writer--we'll be talking abut literary citizenship in lesson 8. This is a great example, thanks.
3. Kudos to your mom to take you on that 370 mile train trip.
TY--Andrea
Wonderful idea this! Love your examples too. The Sarah Moss one inspired my own 3-paragraph essay about what happened when me and my mum tried sneaking into a Banksy show: https://www.thenewworkday.com/p/dismaland