How To Captivate Your Audience When You Write a Personal Essay
Creative Nonfiction tips from your honorary English Professor
Imagine that we are sitting in a classroom on a crisp autumn day. There are twelve of us sitting at desks that are arranged in a circle. There’s natural light pouring in through large glass windows.
You’ve come to learn how to craft creative nonfiction and personal essays. I sit with you, as one of you. We are all on this journey of life, and every single one of us has the wisdom to contribute to the discussion.
If you don’t already know, I give you my credentials: storyteller for as long as I can remember. I hold a Bachelor’s and Master’s in English — Creative Studies. I get paid writing gigs. I’m a paid blogger. I’ve learned some things along the way. I will share them with you.
Let’s begin.
I love reading and writing creative nonfiction. I love creative nonfiction, also termed the personal essay, so much that I founded a publication that houses only works of creative nonfiction and personal essays.
A lot of writers seem a bit confused by the personal essay. They want to know what exactly is a personal essay or creative nonfiction?
I think it may be easier to start with what the personal essay/creative nonfiction is not.
List of What Creative Nonfiction/Personal Essays Are Not
- are not listicles
- are not informational
- are not how-to articles
- are not formal
- are not instructional
- are not inspiration porn
It’s counterintuitive on this platform. I know. I know.
The thing is, we all come to this platform with zero knowledge of how it works. We are either readers or writers. At some point we decided to take a leap into the unknown and try our hand at writing here.
Some of us thought it would be easy peasy lemon squeezy. We thought we’d be part of the 5% raking in the Denning Dough. But 95%ish of us aren’t. I don’t want this to be an article about making money on the platform. Still, I want to be transparent with you — it’s unusual for creative nonfiction and personal essays to reel in the big buckaroonies.
I happen to love writing creative nonfiction and personal essays. Kelly Eden introduced me to the lyric essay, another form of the personal essay, over the past year. And, I flipping love it. I love it so much that I’ve written a few of them. Two got picked up by curious. One didn’t even get curated. It’s one of my favorites. None made over $10.
So, when you write your personal essay, please know it’s for the love of the art. The creativity of writing about your personal struggles and knowing that your audience will somehow sympathize, empathize or relate.
That’s one thing Kelly also taught me this year. The personal essay needs to include a universal struggle for it to read well with audiences. The same goes for memoir writing.
For your starter course in personal essay writing, I will give you some instructions and ask you to do an exercise. Use a pen and paper, a computer, your phone, a dictation system. Whatever way works for you.
Brainstorm
Freewrite some ideas. Pick a song that triggers memories. Pick a scent that means something to you. Pick a person who brings up deep emotions or mixed emotions or both. Think about a place you traveled to and if it changed you. What were you like when you were 10 years old? What are you like today? If money wasn’t an obstacle, what would you be doing right now? Where would you live? Have you ever had to make a decision that involved questionable ethics? What’s one of the most disturbing things you’ve ever seen? One of the most beautiful? What sounds irritates you so much you want to scream? What sound makes you pause and smile? Do you like the feel of sunlight on your hair or head or shoulders? Do you like the sounds of crickets or frogs singing?
Take 10–20 minutes and write without restrictions. Let whatever bubbles up spill out onto the page.
Choose a Universal Theme and a Personal Moment in Time
Take a break. Drink some water. Have a snack. Stretch your arms and legs. Read what you wrote. Do you see any universal themes that are attached to your specific experiences? Fear, love, and food are often themes in my writing. They’re universal, and most people relate on some level.
In my personal essay, My Brain Processes High Fructose Corn Syrup as Love, I write about my struggle with emotional eating. I wanted to use concrete descriptions and lots of sensory experiences to pull in my audience. Here’s an excerpt:
The assault of cinnamon from a cinnamon toothpick. Strong oil on my tongue. Mouthfeel insisting this is grownup. A fidgeting addiction. Relief. The toughness required to chew through the cinnamon layers of an Atomic Fireball. The sweet softening layers of everlasting gobstoppers. The Willy Wonka wonder of sweets.
I hoped to evoke a variety of different feelings in this paragraph, from a battle that is hard to win to the magnetism of candy for both children and adults. The hot, sweet, and soft taste and feel of candy, along with the hot, sweet, soft emotions that come when eating it. I reference a lot of candy from my childhood. I grew up in the 1980s. The original Willy Wonka movie was out at this time, and I fell in love with the movie. Gene Wilder and his crazy curly cartwheeling. The blueberry girl and the fantastical set design.
Personal essays are personal. It can be exciting and nerve-wracking to put our hearts out into the inter-halls of the inter-web. I did that with “How Fear Cornered Me Like a Malevolent Ghost.” I was sure it’d be curated. It wasn’t. I was sure it’d resonate with a large audience. It did okay, but I didn’t knock it out of the ballpark with stats. While I’d love to make a living on this platform, I know it’s unrealistic to expect it to happen. And, I know that we must not use stats to measure the quality of our work. They’re simply not accurate. Sometimes terrible articles go viral while great articles go unread. It’s another universal theme: shit happens.
Here’s an excerpt from my “Fear” essay:
I was an uneasy child, feeling in my bones someone was trying to get me, kidnap me, physically, or sexually assault me. The world was rough and rife, and I was defenseless and powerless against it. After all, I was small, at four or ten or twelve.
When I was thirteen, I watched enough daytime talk shows to know to glare down suspicious-looking people and which way to clutch my house key, so I could use it as a weapon when walking home — if needed.
According to this Masterclass article, the 6 most common themes in literature are:
- Good vs. Evil
- Love
- Redemption
- Courage and Perseverance
- Coming of Age
- Revenge
Muse Storyteller lists 6 common Universal Struggles in Literature:
- Human vs. Humans
- Human vs. Nature
- Human vs. Machines
- Human vs. Spiritual
- Human vs. Self
- Human vs. Society
When we write personal essays and creative nonfiction, we are writing stories. To make the best use of our space on the page, we use creativity and imagination to show the story to our readers. Our personal stories will resonate because what we write about is grounded in life experience that all of us relate to.
Rough Draft
Once you’ve chosen your theme, you can choose which personal life experience/s you want to integrate into your essay to get your point across. Don’t be heavy-handed with your point. Trust your audience. They’re smart. Use creative writing devices to convey your story to your readers. By the end, they’ll sense what you want them to learn. Sometimes it will be obvious. Sometimes it will gnaw and linger.
To paraphrase the words of horror book writer Stephen King, show more, tell less. When you write your rough draft, it’s okay to tell everything instead of show it. It’s your rough draft, after all. It’s not your final draft though. This is where a lot of beginning writers stop, and it will benefit you to keep going. Revision is where we get to play.
Revise, Revise, Revise
This is where you go back through your rough draft and look for a few things.
- What’s extraneous? What’s unnecessary? What words have you overused? Search for “just” and “so” and then delete them. Search for parentheses and ellipses. Delete most or all of them. Search for overused words. Find alternatives. They make you look unsure as a storyteller. That’s not something you want.
- Look at your first paragraph. Does it pull in your reader? If you didn’t know the story, would you want to keep reading it?
- Where can you use dialogue instead of narration? It’s okay to craft dialogue in creative nonfiction. Stick to the basic gist of what actually happened, and you aren’t breaking ethics. If you craft a conversation that inaccurately reflects the experience or changes the thrust of the story, you’ve entered into fiction telling.
- Think about the 6 senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, hearing, and intuition. Where can you add details into your story that reflect these? Readers like to be immersed in the story. To immerse your reader, utilize all the senses in your storytelling. Yes, you’re crafting a personal essay. But you are also telling a story. Remember that and you will be leaps and bounds ahead of other writers who leave that part out.
- Read the story as if you hadn’t lived it. Does it make sense? Is your timeline easy to follow? This is the time to input the necessary details for the story to make sense to the people who haven’t lived it. I did this several times with How I Found Myself Coming of Age in the Silence of Water. Even though it only focuses on a summer afternoon, I wanted to make sure the order of things, from being dropped off at the pool all the way through to being picked up, made sense to the reader. This essay resonated with the majority of readers. It’s a coming-of-age moment that several readers related to.
Title, Subtitle, Tags, and Image
On this platform, Title, Subtitle, Tags, and Image all contribute to your shot at success. Take your time to come up with good ones.
Titles/Subtitles: Hogan Torah named my My Brain Processes High Fructose Corn Syrup as Love personal essay. I struggle with titles. Titles tell your reader what your story is about. You want to make them curious enough to click and read. Hogan tapped into a universal theme and struggle when he named this essay. Feedback friends are invaluable. Find some. Share your strengths with them and listen when they have critical feedback for you. I chose to use “A junk food reckoning” as my subtitle. It further illustrates the universal conflict of human vs. self.
Tags: Use the Nonfiction Tag. It is what this platform uses to describe creative nonfiction. It is what this platform distributes creative nonfiction and personal essays under. This is important. Use the Nonfiction Tag. For the rest of your tags, use topic tags or distribution tags relevant to your story. Some examples include: Addiction, Relationships, Love, Mindfulness, Society, and Mental Health. Go to this platform’s topic page to explore all topic tags.
Image: Your cover image is important. Use Pexels, Pixabay, Creative Commons, Wikicommons, Unsplash, and Your Personal Photo Stash to illustrate your story. Would you click on the story based on the image? Be honest with yourself. Take time to find an image that pops off the page.
Homework
Find a personal essay that captivates you. Search Hippocampus, Brevity, and this platform. Share your favorite one with us. Why does it captivate you?
At home, go through the exercises above to create a rough draft. Bring it back to class and we’ll discuss where you can add detail to turn your personal experience into a universal story. We’ll help you find the areas where you can show instead of tell.
Ready?
Great! I’m looking forward to reading your work.
Aimée Gramblin is practically a superspy because that’s basically what writers are, right? She dabbles in nonfiction articles, emits poetry, and lives her life as a WIP memoirist. She sometimes dabbles in pop culture musings.
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