|
Consider whether you really need those italics. Isn’t it just a little bit possible that the natural rhythm of the sentence itself, the words themselves, will convey the emphasis you’re going for? Just try it without the italics—listen to it in your head, even read it aloud if that helps—and I think you’ll see what I mean.
Italics should be used very sparingly, lest they put too much stress on certain words and start to grate. Trust your words. And don’t even think about all caps or I’ll SCREAM.
0 Comments
A reply to an unsolicited article or essay submission can take a number of forms: maddening silence, an unsigned boilerplate response, a standard-issue rejection that nevertheless has a name attached, or a personal reply (with its own range, from no to qualified yes to revision suggestions to acceptance).
But know this: A response from an actual human being is—especially for beginning writers and freelancers—an opportunity. It is an entry point. If you receive a rejection, particularly an encouraging one, from a real live person with decision-making power, send something else to her, preferably as soon as possible before she forgets your name. This is how relationships with editors begin. From relationships can come assignments, work, and—however you may define it—success. Every piece of writing is a draft. It may be a first draft or a third or a thirteenth. It may be published, but it’s still a draft—it just happens to be one that made it into print. If it hadn’t, admit it, you might still be working on it.
Students often issue a warning that the essay they’re handing out to the workshop is “just” a draft. As if that would make me—or anyone else—read it differently. More forgivingly, I suppose they imagine. But good feedback has nothing to do with forgiveness. We’re all imperfect, we’re all learning, and, assuming we’re paying attention, we’re all getting better. So I stand corrected. One person should indeed be more forgiving. You. Toward yourself A young writer who is between jobs and so, for now, has the luxury to write at least a little every day asked me recently for advice about taking his practice beyond musings on his daily life, beyond what are essentially journal entries—not that there’s anything wrong with journal entries.
Without thinking too hard about it, I found myself recommending a change of location, something it so happens I’ve been trying myself. It’s one thing to have a favorite writing space, whether a home office or a coffee shop, but had he thought about writing in a different place every day—a different spot in his house (chair, room, corner, window, view), a different park at lunchtime? Or a library one day, a bar the next, followed by a scenic overlook, a museum after that? It doesn’t have to be new literally every time, but the idea is not to restrict yourself to the same place every time. If you’re unable to go too far afield, consider, say, four or five that you alternate regularly. Not only might the change of scene trigger thoughts beyond what you had for breakfast, but training yourself to write amid a variety of distraction levels can have value. (I’m writing this at the car dealership as ’80s pop plays—okay, neither planned nor ideal for me.) If it doesn’t work, you can always go back to where you started. And begin again. A few fertile topics for writing:
A ritual—wedding, funeral, graduation, christening, bris. People come together, emotions arise, relationships change or are cemented or something in between. A transition—starting high school or college, a move, retirement, a new job, divorce. Leaving one world for another. A surprise—news of an affair, a financial mistake or setback, a long-held secret revealed, contact from a birth parent or unknown sibling. How did you handle it? Illness and death. These are, of course, transitions, too—and usually surprises. But they deserve their own category. An animal enters your life. This has been done a lot. An animal departs your life. Ditto—and wrenching. So make it new. Reflect on an abstract topic—a genre with a long history going back to antiquity. The subject could be loyalty, indecision, generosity, hatred, memory itself . . . . Carve out a take based on your experience and point of view. Be a philosopher who earns that role by telling really good stories. Two things you should never say in a personal essay:
1. I swear I'm not making this up. I assume you’re not making it up—that’s the implicit pact you’ve made with your readers. If an incident or something someone said seems incredible to you now, let it speak for itself in all its incredibleness. Trust that we’ll buy it. If we don’t, the writing has a problem you need to work on. Promising that it’s true won’t help. 2. I don’t remember exactly, but . . . If you don’t remember—and no one can recall everything that happened last week perfectly, let alone 20 or 37 years ago—then pretend you do. This is not the same as making it up. It’s reimagining—what your father’s words likely were, or your own, or how things went down that April Thursday. You know yourself and the others in your life well enough that, with hard work, you can do this reimagining, this recreation. (And yes, it’s allowed.) Readers look for authority in a personal essay. Don’t make excuses for your story. Claim it. Endings are hard.
When in doubt about how to conclude a piece of journalism such as a profile, a quote is often a surefire way to wrap things up. Not that it’s *always* the best, but it’s a handy device and usually does the job. (Again: when in doubt or when all else fails.) With an essay, it’s not so simple. You don’t want to repeat or summarize what you’ve already said. You don’t want to preach or get “lessony.” Most important, you don’t want to spell everything out. I tell my students that you want an ending that will “haunt” your readers. Not literally spook them—though, hey, maybe sometimes!—but rather leave them with something to figure out, something that will linger. It can be helpful to consider ending on either an image or an action. An image can be something you saw—a scene out the window, say, or an object on the table that suddenly looked different than it did before. An action can be the first thing you did when your antagonist shut the door: Did you pick something up, wash the dishes, make a phone call, start dancing by yourself? If so, how exactly? Let those carefully observed details do the last bit of work for you. One thing I do regularly in my day job is edit personal essays of about 600 words. That’s not very long. Having written a few myself, I can say it isn’t easy. Here are some tips for writing a short essay—which I’ll define here as 750 words or less.
Have something to say, not just something that happened to you. Get in fast. You don’t have the space to ease in or otherwise dilly-dally. This is not the time for long preambles. Fill it with as many details and mini-anecdotes as possible. Avoid summary. An essay of this length succeeds on its specifics. Name songs, give examples, use (brief) dialogue, show how that sensation—you know the one I mean!—felt. When you’re done, go through the essay again and tighten, tighten, tighten. What doesn’t need to be there? What slows things down? How can you say the same thing more succinctly? Then you’ll have room to add more details in the second draft and make it even better. In workshops, I’ll sometimes hear, “I had no idea what this word meant.” I’ll say that having to look something up isn’t bad. You learn a word! But if you’re doing so every other sentence, it’s a problem. There’s also the issue of what an obscure word gains the writer.
Someone I edited used the noun “remit,” as in “That was outside her remit.” Not to brag but I’m a word person—I don’t even bother with the New York Times crossword between Monday and Thursday. After I got my first dictionary at 11, I’d pore over it as if it were an adventure story. But I didn’t know “remit.” The dictionary said: “Chiefly British. An area of responsibility; scope.” The writer, whom I respect, is American. In his defense, he was unaware it was British. My point was it could sound pretentious. His substitute? Ambit (“sphere or scope, as of influence”). I didn’t know that, either—for a moment I thought it might be a typo for “gambit.” We settled on “purview.” So ask yourself as you write if you’re delighting, within reason, in English’s variety to liven up your prose or if you might be seen as showing off. How to tell? It’s a judgment call. And it is your call—just know the consequences. The three most important elements of a personal essay are reflection, honesty, and discovery.
Reflection can be almost invisible—for example, in a narrative from an adolescent perspective, the teenage you asks a question of yourself that then lingers in the background (ideally for the reader to answer). Or it might be a section in which you actually step back for several paragraphs or more to take stock. (See tip 10, “Wanna Make Something of It?”) But on some level, an essay needs a reckoning. Honesty is the sense that you’re being truthful as you remember events and aren’t holding back to protect someone or make yourself look better. Readers can pick up on such subterfuge. Discovery means you’ve discovered something in writing the essay. That may end up on the page as an aha moment or might be between the lines, the transformation that got you where you are as the person telling the story. But if you don’t discover anything, the reader won’t. (See tip 8, “Throw Away the Map”), and discovery is one of the joys of reading. Of writing, too. |
|