Crafting the Personal Essay
”In my experience, here’s how essays form: You get all these bits of data that stick in your head… file drawers in your head. At a certain point you realize one of the drawers is now full, and you might have an essay.” Tim Kreider on the artist at midlife.
How to Write Compelling Personal Essays: 9 Ingredients for Spicing ...
writersdigest.com
The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject in hand. The connection is an intimate one; in fact, it is critical.
Vivian Gornick • The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
But all of them are vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don’t just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real m
... See moreWilliam Zinsser • On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction
Writer George Saunders calls this “achieving the iconic space,” and it’s what he’s after when he meets his creative writing students. “They arrive already wonderful. What we try to do over the next three years is help them achieve what I call their “iconic space” — the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what m... See more
Brie Wolfson • Notes on “Taste”
EB White:
... See more“The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and ta