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.
Phillip Lopate is a writer and teacher best known for his personal essays and for editing The Art of the Personal Essay, a go-to-anthology for anyone exploring the form. Today I’m sharing some tips from him about turning oneself into a character, as I work on my personal essay-plus-paintings project Things Men Gave Me.
Tip 1: Take an accurate inventory of your strengths and weaknesses
First of all, you need to have—or acquire—some distance from yourself…. You need to be able to see yourself from the ceiling: to know, for instance, how you are coming across in social situations, and to assess accurately when you are charming, and when you seem pushy, mousy, or ridiculous. From the viewpoint of honest essay writing, it is just as unsatisfatorily distorting to underrate yourself all the time, and think you are far less effective than you actually are, than to give yourself too much credit. The point is to begin to take inventory of yourself so that you can present that self to the reader as a specific, legible character.
Tip 2: Start with your quirks
A good place to start is your quirks. These are the idiosyncrasies, stubborn tics, antisocial mannerisms, and so on that set you apart from the majority of your fellomen. There will be more than enough time later to assert your common humanity, or better yet, to let the reader make the mental bridge between your oddities and those of everyone else. But to establish credibility, you would do well to resist coming across at first as absolutely average.
Tip 3: Work out some problem or conflict in your essay
An essay needs conflict, just as a short story does. Without conflict, your essay will drift into static mode, repeating your initial observation in a self-satisfied way. What gives an essay dynamism is the need to work out some problem, especially a problem that is not so easily resolved. Fortunately, human beings are conflicted animals, so there is no shortage of tensions that won’t go away. Good essayists know how to select a topic in advance that will generate enough spark in itself, and how to frame the topic so that it will neither be too ambitious nor too slight—so that it’s scale will be appropriate for satisfying exploration.
Tip 4: Be honest and open to exposure
I am inclined to think that what stands in the way of most personal essays is not technique but psychology. The emotional preparedness, if you will, to be honest and open to exposure.
Tip 5: Recognize the charm of the ordinary
[Recognize] that life remains a mystery—even one’s own so-called boring life. [Students] must also be taught to recognize the charm of the ordinary: that daily life that has nourished some of the most enduring essays.
Tip 6: Use aspects of your identity in establishing yourself as a character
Ethnicity, gender, religion, class, geography, politics: These are all strong determinants in the development of character…. [We] must be bold in working with these categories as starting points: be not afraid to meditate on our membership in this or that community, and the degree to which it has or has not formed us.
Tip 7: Insert information about yourself like a journalist
When you write personal essays… you can never assume that your readers will know a thing about your background, regardless of how many times you have explained it in previous essays. So you must become deft at insrting that information swifly and casually… and not worry about the fact that it may be redundant to your regular readers, if you’re lucky enough to have any…
In this sense, the personal essayist must be like a journalist, who respects the obligation to get in the basic orienting facts—the who, what, where, when and why—as close to the top of every story as possible.
Tip 8: Be amusing
The reader must find you amusing (there, I’ve said it). Amusing enough to follow you, no matter what essay topic you propose. Whether you are writing this time on world peace or a bar of soap, readers must sense quickly from the first paragraph that you are going to keep them engaged. The trouble is that you cannot amuse the reader unless you are already self-amused.
Tip 9: Get over your self-hatred
It is an observable fact that most people don’t like themselves…. [All] I can say from my vantage point as a teacher and anthologist of the personal essay, is that an odor of self-disgust mars many performances in this genre and keeps many would-be practitioners from developing into full-fledged professionals. They exhibit a form of stuttering, of never being able to get past the initial, superficial self-presentation and diving into the wreck of one’s personality with gusto.
Tip 10: Be curious about yourself
The proper alternative to self-dislike is not being pleased with oneself—a smugness equally distasteful to the reader—but being curious about oneself. Such self-curiosity (of which Montaigne, the father of the essay, was the greatest exemplar) can only grow out of that detachment or distance from oneself about which I spoke earlier.
Tip 11: Learn to see yourself in a comic light
I am convinced that self-amusement is a discipline that can be learned; it can be practiced even by people (such as myself) who have at times a strong-self-dislike or at least self-mistrust. I may be tired of myself in everyday life, but once I start narrating a situation or set of ideas on the page, I begin to see my “I” in a comic light, and I manuever him so that he will best amuse the reader. My “I” is not me entirely, but a character drawn from aspects of myself…. I am willing to let my “I” take his pratfalls; maintaining one’s dignity should not be a paramount issue in personal essays.
Tip 12: Seek to entertain the reader
But first must come the urge to entertain the reader. From that impulse everything else follows.
Tip 13: Share and analyze the flaws in your thinking
There is also considerable character development in expressing your opinions, half-baked ideas, etc., etc., provided you are willing to analyze the flaws in your thinking and to entertain arguments against your hobbyhorses and not be too solemn about it. The essay thrives on daring, darting flights of thought. You must get in the habit of inviting, not censoring, your most far-fetched, mischievous notions, because even if they prove cockeyed, they may point to an element of truth that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Tip 14: Give your “I” something to do
[It] would do well for personal essayists to follow another rule of fiction writers, who tell you that if you want to reveal someone’s character, actions speak louder than words. Give your “I” something to do. It’s fine to be privy to all of “I’s” ruminations and cerebral nuances, but consciousness can only take us so far in the illumination of character. Particularly if you are writing a memoir essay, with chronology and narrative, it is often liberating to have the “I” step beyond the observer role and be implicated crucially in the overall action.
Tip 15: Show your mistakes and how you’ve caused pain
How many memoir pieces suffer from a self-righteous setup: the writer telling a story in which Mr. or Ms. “I” is the passive recipient of the world’s cruclty, the character’s first exposure to racism or betrayal, say. There is something off-putting about a nonfiction story in which the “I” character is right and all the others wrong, the “I” infinitely more sinned against than sinning. by showing our complicity in the world’s stock of sorrow, we convince the reader of our reality and even gain his sympathy.
Tip 16: Consider starting with remorse
There are hard choices to be made when a person is put under pressure. And it’s in having made the wrong choice, curiously enough, that we are made all the more aware of our freedom and potential for humanity. So it is that remorse is often the starting point for good personal essays, whose working-out brings the necessary self-forgiveness (not to mention self-amusement) to outgrow shame.
Here’s a distilled list of these tips for you to use as a checklist when writing and editing your personal essays:
- Take accurate inventory of your strengths and weaknesses
- Start with your quirks
- Work out some problem or conflict in your essay
- Be honest and open to exposure
- Recognize the charm of the ordinary
- Use aspects of your identity in establishing yourself as a character
- Insert information about yourself like a journalist
- Be amusing
- Get over your self-hatred
- Be curious about yourself
- Present yourself in a comic light
- Seek to entertain the reader
- Share and analyze flaws in your thinking
- Give your “I” some action to do, don’t just share her thinking
- Show your mistakes and how you’ve caused pain
- Start with remorse over something you’ve done