Note: This piece is a discussion of the literary genre of the personal essay. While I’ve posted it here on a blog, what I’ve written is not a good example of the genre of the blog post. For one, it’s waaaaaay too long. Hope you enjoy it anyway.

One of the things we want to do here at Segullah is “encourage literary talent.” Of course, one of the ways we try to promote good writing is by providing some examples of it here, at the blog . . . but did you realize Segullah isn’t just a blog? Seriously! We also publish this pretty little ink-and-paper novelty called a magazine. It’s a cool contraption because you can read it in the bathroom, on the toilet OR in the tub, two places where you might actually be left alone for five minutes at a stretch. (And yes, technically, it’s true the talented among us can manage a laptop in the bathroom. But paperless revolution be darned, I will always and forever have a magazine on top of every toilet in my house, I solemnly swear.)

I bring this up since I’ve heard that some of you blog-readers are interested in submitting to the magazine. This makes sense because nothing much beats seeing your name in print . . . inside a magazine . . . that you imagine sitting on top of toilets in bathrooms around the world. But what’s keeping you from submitting is this: You feel pretty good about blogging, but you’re not so sure about writing “creative nonfiction,” which is what we magazine publish-y types call any kind of literary writing that both exhibits artistic merit and is based in personal experience. (”Isn’t that what blogging is?” you ask. We’ll get to that.) The problem is you’re not sure if you can write “creative nonfiction” because, well, you don’t know what it IS, really.

Here’s a little secret: nobody knows what creative nonfiction is.

Okay, so that’s a little disingenuous. Good creative nonfiction is like pornography, in one way and one way alone: it’s difficult to define precisely, but you know it when you see it. And we here at Segullah want to see more of it. (Creative nonfiction . . . not pornography, of course.)

Within the genre of “creative nonfiction” there are many sub-genres. We’ll focus on one specifically, since it’s the type of creative nonfiction we’re most interested in seeing here at Segullah: the personal essay.

The personal essay has its origins in personal experience. The writer may choose to use a personal experience that happened yesterday or that happened years ago. The “experience” doesn’t have to be earth shattering or traumatic. A personal essay can even stem from a simple, seemingly mundane observation: a child lining up her rows of school supplies, a melted popsicle on the pavement, a limping dog on a busy road.

What’s important, though, is that a personal essay uses this experience to illuminate a point greater than the experience itself. The essayist Philip Gerard says, “The subject has to carry itself and also be an elegant vehicle for larger meanings.” In other words, the explicit topic of the essay must hold our attention. The personal experience you share must be interesting in and of itself—there must be some kind of conflict, or surprise, or pathos, or humor, or something in the story. But that experience must also do what I like to call “double duty”—it must be representative of a greater truth or insight that extends beyond your personal experience, and this greater truth must be somehow communicated to your audience. It seems to me that one of the biggest differences between an average blog post and a well-wrought personal essay is the successful communication of this greater truth.

Creative nonfiction is a literary art and, therefore, uses the techniques found in literature. It is useful to remember that good creative nonfiction often reads much like fiction, employing the skillful use of dialogue, scene, figurative language, etc. With fiction, however, the writer isn’t supposed to be intrusive, telling the reader what the story means. The writer is supposed to tell a story and let the reader figure it out. But with the personal essay things tend to get trickier: the writer is expected to intrude, at least a little bit, and interpret the events for the reader. Usually. Kind of.

I’ll let Janet Burroway, author of Imaginative Writing, explain: “A [personal essay] is a story, and like a story it will describe a journey and a change; it will be written in a scene or scenes; it will characterize through detail and dialogue. The difference is not only that it is based on the facts as your memory can dredge them up, but that you may interpret it for us as you go along or at the end or both: this is what I learned, this is how I changed, this is how I relate my experience to the experience of the world, and of my readers. ” Burroway also gives this practical bit of advice: “The success of your essay may well depend on whether you achieve a balance between the imaginative [the story] and the reflective [the interpretation]. . . . Often the story and its drama will fill most of the sentences—that is what keeps a reader reading—and the startling or revelatory or thoughtful nature of your insight about the story [the interpretation] will usually occupy less space.”

This is hard to do well. One of the reasons I prefer writing fiction to nonfiction is because it is so very difficult to balance the story and the interpretation, the showing and the telling, in a satisfying way. And being Mormon bloggers, the Mormon side of our writerly personality may sink our personal essay in one direction, and the blogger side many sink it in another.

The Mormon side of our writing-selves might be tempted to write a sacrament meeting talk instead of a personal essay. We’re so used to the format: introduce topic, illustrate with anecdote, flesh out the “moral of the story” with scriptures and quotes from church leaders, bear testimony, amen. While this method may (or may not) help you keep the attention of 300 hungry/hot/wiggly humans trapped in a room on a Sunday afternoon, vary rarely is it the recipe for a successful personal essay. The problem is the writer intrudes too much with this method. You approach the essay as one who’s been assigned a “topic” instead of as one with a story to tell . . . and is it no wonder this method, based as it is in preaching, comes off as preachy? Almost always, the story itself should be the center of your piece. Nothing turns a reader off faster than too much authorial pontificating.

The blogging side of our writing-selves gets us in trouble in another way. While an essay styled like a sacrament meeting talk can give the impression of a writer standing at a pulpit, expounding Truth, an essay styled like a blog post can come off like the writer’s in the hall, whispering a secret to her very best friend. In a sacrament meeting talk, the writer is too conscious of communicating a broader point for an audience; in a blog post, the writer’s not conscious enough.

I’m of the opinion that effective blogging is a skill in its own right, but blogs are not essays. For one, a good essay is revised (and revised and revised—and, yes, I realize some of you revise your blog posts, but I’m speaking generally here). But the difference I want to focus on is one of audience. Very often, blog posts are focused on personal daily experience and are written in a chatty, intimate way that doesn’t dwell on the universal significance of the experience shared. As Burroway says, “The personal essay is a form that allows maximum mobility from the small, the daily, the domestic, to the universal and significant.”

Although every once in a while I will read a blog post that is more like a personal essay in that it delves more deeply into its themes and attempts to communicate a greater meaning to a large audience, most blog posts don’t venture too far beyond the bounds of the experience itself. The writer’s stance before the audience is different, too: in a blog post, the writer assumes a certain intimacy with the audience. (And even when a blogger is very popular and doesn’t “know” most of her readers, the assumed intimacy creates a feeling of peeking inside another person’s window and is part of what makes reading somebody else’s blog an interesting experience—that sense of being allowed inside somewhere we’re not entirely supposed to be.) A personal essay, however, assumes a wide audience from the get-go. It’s not a secret whispered between friends that was somehow overheard.

Of course, there are many effective essays that do very little authorial interpretation of the event but still manage to communicate a larger, universal theme to a wide audience. See, for example, Brittney Carman’s Barcelona, Venezuela from Segullah’s Spring 2007 issue. She only gives one line that I read as authorial interpretation: “I understand that, even for the faithful, desperation will run comfortless at times—deep and wild.” But the greater meaning of her experience is present throughout the entire essay, there between the lines.

Other effective essays may have more philosophizing and interpreting alongside the storytelling. For example, in “Keeping Attendance” by Julie Ransom, Segullah’s essay contest winner in 2007, Ransom begins the essay by telling a story, but uses this story as a jumping off point for rumination on significant themes, using the experience as a metaphor for that greater meaning. (I love how a story about arriving late at church because of a broken foot winds up in a place where the writer is comparing the similar Latin root of the word “ligament” and “religion.”)

These pieces are quite different from each other, but they are both effective—and beautiful—personal essays.

Like I said at the beginning, “creative nonfiction” is very difficult to define, but there are elements common to all effective personal essays that a writer can strive to emulate. And once you do, who knows? You might find your essay inside the pages of a handsome print magazine—and you can put that magazine on a shelf, by your bedside, or on top of the toilet in your guest bathroom. It’s entirely up to you.

Do you write creative nonfiction as well as blog? What are the differences as you see them? Do you want to write personal essays but haven’t made the leap? What’s stopping you?

And, if you’re interested, I’m teaching beginning creative writing at the BYU Salt Lake Center this fall. Thursday nights from 7:30–10:00. You don’t have to be a matriculated BYU student to attend.

Related posts:

  1. Call for Submissions to Segullah: Gifts of the Spirit
  2. Want to write for Segullah? Read Segullah!
  3. The Art of Blogging


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