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…
Tag: Barbara Abercrombie
Writing Personal Essays
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…
We read and write personal essays for the same reasons. — Barbara Abercrombie
“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.