I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Wednesday Writing, I consider my writing practice and skills and how to improve upon them.
From the editor of The New York Times Modern Love column, Submission Tip #6:
Nearly 25 years ago I was sitting in a writing workshop in Tucson, Arizona with a bunch of other aspiring writers, most of us in our mid-20s. The teacher was a man name Rust Hills who had been fiction editor at Esquire for decades.
One day Rust began class by asking, “Why do we read stories anyway?”
We muttered a few responses about appreciating “language” and “technique.” We thought of stories as things that were mostly concerned with style. And also we wanted to sound smart, which we weren’t.
Finally he said, a little exasperated: “Don’t we read stories because we want to find out what happens?”
Yes. That’s why we read stories.
Don’t underestimate the power of a reader’s curiosity, whether you’re writing a short story or a personal essay. Too often people give everything away at the start. In newspaper articles, you’re supposed to put all the important information at the top, right?
Not in this kind of newspaper story. It needs to unfold in a dramatic arc, with mystery and surprise. If the surprise in your story is the fact that your unlikely relationship led to marriage, don’t say in the first line: “I met my future wife at cocktail party…”
I have three personal essays in the works that are the start of my revamped memoir, which I’m transforming from a standard memoir into a set of interlinked personal essays.
I am reviewing advice on personal essays in order to improve upon them. This tip seems important at the highest level: how am I structuring each essay so that it tells a satisfying story?
One way to grab a reader’s attention is to start your essay in the middle of dialogue or events, in order to hook them. But do this in a way that you don’t confuse them.
But that’s not enough; the story that unfolds in the essay must do so in a way that increases tension and conflict, that shares specific details that intrigue and delight, and that presents characters that the reader cares about. For the Modern Love column, this all needs to happen in about 1700 words (to allow editing down to the ~1500 word essays that are typically published).
Currently, I’m writing essays that are about 2500 to 3000 words long. I wonder if it might be a good idea to shorten them? It could be good discipline I think, and it might make the eventually reading of the essays more fun.