Crafting the Personal Essay

“A responsibility of literature is to make people awake, present, alive,” Natalie Goldberg advises. “If the writer wanders, then the reader, too, will wander. The fly on the table might be part of the whole description of a restaurant. It might be appropriate to tell precisely the sandwich that it just walked over, but there is a fine line between

“If you can speak what you will never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things.” — Henry David Thoreau

So the contemplative essay combines the sense of freeform thinking with careful editing to create the artifice of good conversation on the page.

In fact, some believe the essay form as devised by Montaigne came about because of the grief he felt when his close friend, the poet Étienne de la Boétie, died young. Montaigne’s essays were the conversations he would have shared with his dear friend, had de la Boétie lived.

Essayist Nancy Mairs has written, “It’s as though some writers have the sense never to enter the room until they’ve thrown the switch and flooded it with light, whereas others, like me, insist on entering rooms with burnt-out bulbs or blown fuses or no wiring at all.”

Orson Scott Card, the celebrated science fiction author, reminds us that “metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space,”

“My conceptions and my judgment move only by groping, staggering, stumbling, and blundering,” Montaigne wrote, “and when I have gone ahead as far as I can, still I am not at all satisfied.”

Despite eccentricities of language and style, we can learn from Montaigne the basic essay impulse: to ruminate, consider, explore. The writer of a personal essay does not begin with an idea and then struggle to prove her point; she investigates, keeps an open mind, goes wherever the thought may lead, and, in fact, may end the essay having still not

“The style of the essayist is that of an extremely intelligent, highly commonsensical person talking, without stammer and with impressive coherence, to him — or herself and to anyone else who cares to eavesdrop.” — Joseph Epstein