The Paradox of Writing Personal Essays

True to my new year's resolution, I've been working diligently on a couple of personal essays. One essay has already been workshopped, polished, and submitted to my dream market *fingers crossed.* I find essay writing to be a therapeutic process (after I finished my most recent essay, I even slept better for several nights), but it can also be emotionally grueling.

Those freelancers who write personal essays in addition to other genres know what I mean.

As freelance writers, we're used to rejection. In fact, those of us who've been at for awhile have learned to create a healthy distance between our success as a writer and our own self-worth. After all, especially in this climate, the decision of whether or not to publish an article often has more to do with business considerations (advertising space, reader demographics, etc.) than creative ones. We understand this, and we've cultivated a thick skin to compensate.

But writing an effective personal essay requires us to tap into a deeper emotional consciousness. It requires us to bare our secret vulnerabilities and desires. And, unfortunately, that scary feeling of complete vulnerability doesn't end once you get an acceptance. Frankly, reader reactions can be even scarier than editors'.

Of the three essays I've published in the past year or so, two of them elicited a very strong reaction, both positively and negatively. Some people wrote to me saying, "I've been in that situation and your essay captured exactly what I felt." Others told me, "you'll never work in this town again!" and "you liberals are going to hell." Such is the cost of putting your writing out there, but getting that kind of reaction shows that you've hit on an important topic.

Scarier still are the reactions from the people you've actually written about. The essay I'm currently shopping around includes snippets of conversations I had with my boyfriend and two other friends after my Dad died. I showed the essay to all three of them and everyone graciously gave me their blessings to publish the piece. Phew!

Whenever you're writing about real people from your own life (rather than reporting on events or people outside your personal sphere), the boundaries can get a little blurry. Here are my suggestions on handling this gray area:

1. Ask, even if the essays seems innocuous to you. Some people are move private than others. My boyfriend keeps a low profile online, so I worried that he might not want to appear in the essay at all. Taking him out would have required massive rewrites and restructuring, but I felt he needed to see the piece in its entirety before he gave his opinion. Fortunately, he was flattered ("no one has ever written about me!") and bought me a very thoughtful birthday gift based on a detail I'd chosen to include in the essay. Boyfriends/husbands of writers: take note!


2. Respect other peoples' privacy. Though the boyfriend was flattered, there was one detail he felt revealed TMI (too much information), so I took it out. It's important for the people in my life to understand that just because I blog and write essays, I'm not going to indiscriminately share all the juicy (and mundane) details of our private life. With essays, I only use real life details or snippets of conversation to illustrate a larger point. Another writer, Jody Mace, actually gives her kids a cut of her fee when she publishes an essay that mentions her kids.


3. Be clear that you're asking for their permission, not a critique. You need to ask to ensure peoples' comfort levels, but you don't want to give them free rein to rewrite according to their own perspective. Everyone will remember the same events in a slightly different way, but if you're writing the essay, then it's your memories that matter. In one case, I asked to friend to help me remember the singer of a song we listened to during one scene, but I didn't ask her if she felt there was too much dialogue or if it needed a better ending. I enlisted the help of another (impartial) writer for questions like that.


4. When in doubt, don't name names. Some publications will allow you to rename people in your essays to protect their privacy (for instance, "let's call the guy I dated in college Bob"). Others won't, because after all, essays are supposed to be true. Sometimes you can get away with simple saying "my friend this" or "my cousin that." That can get confusing if you introduce too many characters, so you can also create nicknames for people, like this "Modern Love" column nicknames a man in her life "The Engineer."

What's your feeling on personal essays? Would you ever publish something that might upset people in your personal life if you felt the story needed to be told? Would you write it under a pseudonym? What about people who are no longer in your life?

Flickr photo courtesy of tomsaint11