Four memoirists share advice on writing the personal essay:
Dani Shapiro, author of “Devotion: A Memoir”
First, throw the “what ifs” out the window. What if Great-Aunt Edna reads this? What if people think I’m stupid, silly, vapid, egocentric, just plain nuts? The high-wire act of writing in the first person involves the willingness to reveal oneself in all of one’s humanity. But make no mistake: this is not your diary. You are not letting it all hang out. You are picking and choosing every single word. Do not forget that you’re carving a story out of what is true — but still, you’re telling a story.
Darin Strauss, author of “Half a Life”
One solid trick is to write in the third person, then to do a word replace — the writer should turn every “I” to “she” (or “he”), every “my” to “her,” etc. Why? Because what can make writing about oneself tough is doing so impartially: when judging who we are, it’s easy to award ourselves more than due process. The tendency is, we grant full pardons. This makes good propaganda but bad writing. Looking at yourself as you would a character should help remove that extra pinch of sugar by which you want to sweeten your story a little bit. Just make sure you switch back from third to first person.
Christopher R. Beha, author of “The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death and Pretty Much Everything Else”
Write about the things that puzzle you. I say this though it directly contradicts the famous dictum “write what you know.” Good writing emerges from discovery. If you begin with what you know, where do you go next? If you begin with uncertainty, possibilities will present themselves. You might even find that you know more than you thought you did. In the meantime, writing through confusion allows you to avoid arrogance and self-absorption, the great risks of all first-person writing. So forget “write what you know.” Write what you don’t know, but would like to find out.
Ander Monson, author of “Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir”
We find ourselves not by turning inward toward what we imagine is inside us, but by the act of looking outward at the world. The self is nothing without what it looks at. On its own, it’s inert. Kick it. Poke it. It seems dead. But point it at something else — Doritos, lawn darts, abandoned mines in Upper Michigan, a cappella groups, Dungeons & Dragons — and it perks up. Thus a focus on our obsessions, however nerdy, creepy, lovely, allows the self to emerge and live and blink a little in the bright light. In other words, the best way to write about ourselves is to write about something specific in the world. We don’t write about ourselves. We write ourselves.
NYT 7 Jan 2011
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