The Short Personal Essay

The short personal essay is the most publishable of all genres of creative writing. Unlike the market for fiction or poetry, there is always a place to send a personal essay. If you write something true and honest from your- heart (or funny bone), if there's a point to it, if the subject and word count is right for the market, it will eventually be published.

. . . Though not adhering to the formal rules of the essays you wrote in English class, the personal essay is crafted and shaped: it has a beginning, a middle and an ending. The opening must draw the reader in, set up expectations for what the essay is about. The essay's tone and subject are clear in the first paragraph.

In the middle of the essay, something happens: An anecdote illustrates your theme. The reader wants to go through the experience with you, not be told about it from a distance. Use the devices of fiction. Set the scene. What were your five senses picking up? What was said? Use dialogue if you can. Be specific in your details and descriptions of people and places.

from "On Writing Personal Essays" by Barbara Abercrombie
The Writer January 2003

SAMARITAN by Richard Price

Try reminding [Price] that some people think the novel is dead. "What does that mean, the novel's dead?" He gives you -a funny look "The novel will show up at your funeral ". . . .The novel is alive because writers like Price are crafting books like Samaritan (Knopf; 379 pages), about a guy who discovers the hard way what a complicated transaction charity can be.

from "The Bad in Goodness" by Richard Lacavo, Review of Samaritan by Richard Price, Time January 13, 2002

Technique

"I'VE GOT THE STORY but I don't have any technique," a student once told Flannery O'Connor. At its worst, technique appears to be nothing more than a highbrow term for formula. But a formula demands that you follow it faithfully; technique is studied so a full range of devices may be used by a writer to make a story tellable, artful, which in some cases includes breaking with conventions. Formula imposes limits on a writer; technique frees a writer to expand the methods of convention, should he or she choose to take that path. The only rule to observe when breaking convention is extremely simple. Do not purposely confuse the reader. Make clear the new method you're employing. If the reader cannot follow it, you've failed. If the reader can, you've done what Flaubert did-invent a new convention (in his case, modern point of view) for literature's future use.

"Technique is a word they all trot out," O'Connor wrote, lamenting the cartbefore-the-horse approach to storytelling, which characterized her student's confusion about the act of discovery. For although technique can be studied, technique alone will never produce a story. What's more, one can never claim to have a story yet lack the technique for telling it. That's the same as saying I've written the story, now I just have to write the sentences. What O'Connor's student had was the idea of a story, not the story itself, which is inextricable from the "words on the page" used to tell it. And these words, just like Flaubert's innovations concerning omniscient point of view, are discovered solely in the act of writing.

"The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories," O'Connor said, "is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done. The time to think of technique is when you've actually got the story in front of you." Sound, unassailable advice. Also the last thing many apprentice writers want to hear, because getting the story in front of you is terrifying, painful, and in many cases nearly impossible. Technique, we naively hope, is a miracle cure, some kind of combination tranquilizer-antidepressant-pain reliever for our distressed literary condition. It isn't.

"Technique," according to Mark Schorer, "is the means by which the writer's experience, which is his subject matter, compels him to attend to it; technique is the only means he has of discovering, exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and, finally, of evaluating it."

Without a masterful understanding of literary technique a writer is doomed never to fully communicate his or her story, its rendered experiences and their various meanings, to a reader. "The writer capable of the most exacting technical scrutiny of his subject matter," Schorer believed, "will produce works ... which reverberate with maximum meaning."

From The Workshop (edited by Tom Grimes)

The First Person Character

The point about Marlowe is to remember that he is a first person character, whether he shows up that way in a radio script or not. A first person character is under the disadvantage that he must be a better person to the reader than he is to himself. Too many first person characters give an offensively cocky impression. That's bad. To avoid that you must not always give him the punch line or the exit line. Not even often. Let other characters have the toppers. Leave him without a gag, insofar as it is possible. Howard Hawks, a very wise hombre, remarked to me when he was doing The Big Sleep that he thought one of Marlowe's most effective tricks was just giving the other man the trick and not saying anything at all. That puts the other man on the spot. A devastating crack loses a lot of its force when it doesn't provoke any answer, when the other man just rides with the punch. Then you either have to top it yourself or give ground. (Raymond Chandler)


Raymond Chandler Papers: Selected Letters and Nofiction, 1909-1959

Resolution

A resolution is simply any change in the character or situation that resolves the complication.”


Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Franklin

Revision

I can't write five words but that I change seven. (Dorothy Parker)

Book Blurbs

Judging by their fulsome endorsements on the jackets of so many novels, it's apparent that some critics don't get out much. To blurb-bestowers, no work is ever just moderately entertaining. Books are "captivating," "enthralling," "sprawling," and even "festooning." Maybe I'm just naive, but when I read a book that's billed as "masterpiece of savage comedy," I expect something like Wise Blood or Loved One. "Riveting from first page to last" is a description that gets my hopes tip: it promises at least the intensity of Crime and Punishment, and a lot more than Babbitt. Obviously, I deal with some disappointment. I guess honesty doesn't make good jacket copy, or we'd see more blurbs like this:

"A dense book in which very little happens."

"A well-written but depressing novel, lacking in excitement what it makes up for in style.

As far as outward versus inward fiction, I think that introspection is here to stay. We're an inward-looking society, and despite what Tom Wolfe says, that's not entirely a bad thing, either for the culture or for the novel as an art form. Many of us. . .actually enjoy all the navel gazing.

from "Looking Up from the Navel" by Betty Smartt Carter, Books and Culture, July/August 2002.