Search Results for: personal essay

Personal Essay – Pivotal Event Plus . . .

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A personal essay isn’t your life story. It’s a pivotal event. The narrator has an epiphany, or is changed at the end of the story. “Personal essays represent what you think, what you feel . . . your effort to communicate those thoughts and feelings to others . . . What is the point of your essay? Don’t belabor the point too much; let the point grow out of the experience of the essay. It might be true, in fact, that you didn’t even have a point to make when you started writing your essay. Go ahead and write it and see if a point develops.” — The Personal Essay More on personal essay: How to Write a Personal Essay Writing Personal Essays Personal Essay is Memoir in Short Form Still don’t know how to start? Gather your writing implements: Paper, pen, pencil, writing device, choose a writing prompt and…

How to Write a Personal Essay

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We aren’t born knowing how to write personal essays. So, how does one learn to write personal essays? The following is inspired from “A Few Tips for Writing Personal Essays,” by Robert Lee Brewer, March/April 2021 Writer’s Digest. Read personal essays! Then write. You will discover your style as you write. ~ Start with action. Save backstory for later in the essay. The beginning should have a compelling scene that hooks readers and makes them want to continue reading. The following is an example of “start with action.” The hook compelled me to read the entire essay. “When he walked into a San Francisco barbershop after the war, he was told by the owner, ‘We don’t serve Japs here.’ The owner of the barbershop obviously didn’t know who the one-armed Japanese-American was – his name was Daniel Inouye. And, according to one website that honors heroes, he was one tough…

Writing Personal Essays

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Make a list of issues and experiences, important and trivial, in your life right now. What frustrated you in the past month? What made you laugh or cry? What made you lose your temper? What was the worst thing that happened? The best? The most disturbing and weird? Write:  Choose one thing from your list and write about it. Write whatever comes to mind. Write what you would really like to say to the other people involved. Write what happened from your point of view. Prompt inspired from, “On Writing Personal Essays,” by Barbra Abercrombie, The Writer magazine, January 2003 Barbara Abercrombie teaches creative writing in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension, and a master class in memoir and personal essays via Zoom and Canvas. “We write the book we need to read and The Language of Loss is the book I needed when my husband died six years ago. It’s an…

The personal essay is an act . . .

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“The personal essay begins as an act of exploration. We write in order to figure out where we’re going and make sense of where we’ve been.” — Susan Bono Susan Bono is an extraordinary writer whose words go right to the heart. You can read her excellent writing in her collection of short essays in What Have We Here: Essays about Keeping House and Finding Home. Susan is a writing teacher and freelance editor specializing in memoir. She facilitates writing workshops at Copperfield’s Books in Petaluma. California.

Personal Essay As Therapy

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“One reason we choose to write essays instead of another kind of nonfiction piece is because we can use the personal essay as a kind of therapy. Sometimes the act of writing gives us the opportunity to work through the conflict and come up with another way of looking at the situation. As the writer explores her problem, owns it, and then comes up with a resolution that will change how she relates to her problem in the future, the reader will be looking at her own life and doing the same thing. That’s why the essayist must be committed to the process of discovery and must be as honest as she possibly can be about what she uncovers. More than any other piece of nonfiction, the personal essay has to be written and rewritten and rewritten, often many times, to get to the heart of what it is we…

Personal Essay is Memoir in Short Form

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If you have written your memoir, or are in the process, and it’s not shaping into what you envisioned, you could transform it into a personal essay. It might be easier, at some point, to concentrate on writing a personal essay, rather than a book-length manuscript. There are many posts on The Write Spot Blog about how to write personal essays. (Please scroll down for the how-to posts). You may be writing vignettes to satisfy your desire to write family stories. You can publish these with the help of many do-it-yourself publishing companies. If you want your personal essays to be published for public consumption, there are many opportunities for submission: Big Brick Review, Chicken Soup for The Soul, The Christian Science Monitor,  Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction and so many more places. Check the back pages of Writer’s Digest magazine. You can submit your writing to be included in…

The Christian Science Monitor accepts personal essay, poems and more . . .

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The Christian Science Monitor is an independent international news organization that delivers thoughtful, global coverage. “We want to inspire people to think about what they’ve read long after they’ve left the page. To share what they’ve learned with others. And to do something that makes a difference.” The Home Forum section of The Christian Science Monitor is looking for upbeat, personal essays from 400 to 800 words. “We also welcome short poems. All material must be original and previously unpublished. For seasonal material, be aware that if you submit something that is about a particular month, holiday, event (back to school, graduation), or season, we need to receive it a minimum of six weeks ahead.” Essays: These are first-person, nonfiction explorations of how you responded to a place, a person, a situation, an event, or happenings in everyday life. Tell a story; share a funny true tale. The humor should…

Full Grown People publishes personal essays

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Full Grown People publishes personal essays that explore what it means to be an adult . . . essays that explore those moments in life when you wonder, what’s next? “Essays should be between 800 and 4,000 words and have a literary quality: engaging and smart without being academic or schmaltzy. Work hard on your endings—if you’ve built up some good momentum, ending it on the right note is sometimes the difference between a contender and an acceptance.” Click here for submission guidelines.  

We read and write personal essays for the same reasons. — Barbara Abercrombie

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“We read personal essays to understand our lives, to find humor, to discover a new way of looking at the world. We write them for the same reasons. the short personal essay (about 500 to 1200 words) is your journey through a specific experience, whether commonplace or one of life’s milestones, and ranges from the personal to something more universal, something your readers can connect with.” — Barbara Abercrombie,  “On Writing Personal Essays,” The Writer, January 2003.

Three Top Pointers About Writing Personal Essays by Kelly Caldwell

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From December 2013 issue of The Writer magazine. “In the Classroom” with Kelly Caldwell. 1. Don’t worry about What is My Larger Subject? in your first draft. Just get out of your own way, write the story and let the universal themes of the essay reveal themselves. 2. When you’ve got that first draft, ask yourself, “So what?” and write down the answer. 3. When you reach a point in the essay where you want to make things up because they would be more interesting or more satisfying or just prettier, don’t. This is creative NONfiction, after all, and yes, that matters. Also, those are usually places where you need to dig deeper, because that’s where the richer, more meaningful material usually lies.