Personal essays—we see them all the time out in cyber-space. We read about how this person went to the store yesterday and met a woman there who said something that annoyed them or hurt them or made them feel sad, and now they’re trying to air their feelings. We read about people meeting together at coffee shops and we read about the bigger things that happen—a new car!—and we read about the tiny minutiae of a day.
One of the questions we’ll often ask ourselves if we’re in the business of blogging or writing personal essays is the question, Am I an interesting enough person to write a personal essay?
I’ve considered this one often. I run a humor parenting blog, and many times I’m simply telling the daily stories of my life in a humorous way (because life is pretty humorous when we think about it long enough. Sometimes I try to make those stories a bit more universal, and sometimes I make them so specific to my family that I don’t think anybody’s even going to care about it. Turns out, people do. People do care about it, because, in every story, they get to see themselves.
At least this is what I believe.
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We’re all connected by our humanity. If we find value in a story, others will, too.
Now. It makes a difference how you tell it. If we’re just telling the facts of our outing to the grocery store, we’re probably not going to get many people nodding their heads in agreement. No one really wants to know that at 8 a.m. we pulled up, and the parking lot was close to empty, and we brought home five pounds of apples and ten pounds of bananas, because we live with the equivalent of monkeys. But what they will want to know is how we feel about that grocery bill and maybe a funny story about what one of the kids did when he tried to carry a gallon of milk to the basket.
The most important characteristic of a personal essay is its emotion.
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Emotion is universal. That’s how we make our story universal to our audience. We sprinkle in a little emotion, tell about how this trip to the grocery store affected us, tell about what we thought as we strolled out the doors with that basket full of groceries and the receipt still crumpled in our hands and kids hanging off the sides, making the basket even harder to push. We tell about how it seemed like the sky turned grayer as we walked to the car, because we’re worried about how we’ll possibly be able to feed the bottomless pits of six boys when school’s out for the summer.
We don’t have to make up situations or things that happened in order to make our lives interesting enough to warrant a personal essays. The trick is just to highlight the emotions of an encounter—whether that’s humor, fear, hope, joy, frustration, surprise. The possibilities are endless. I could write four different personal essays out of one event in my life, focusing on different emotions.
Essentially, a personal essay is the telling of a life story and our reflection on it.
So it doesn’t really matter if we lead an “interesting enough” life or not (also, who gets to decide who leads an interesting enough life, anyway); what matters is that we know how to tell a story.
Do we know how to tell a story?
A story has characters, and it has plot, and it has tension (this is where I feel we’re getting a bit confused in our culture of marketing-with-a-story, because we’ve forgotten what the essentials of a story are—but more on that another day). We start with characters, we add a little conflict and tension, we have a theme, we have characters transforming, even a tiny little bit, by the end of it. A personal essay needs all of those elements, too.
If we think about our lives, they have all of those elements. Characters: family and friends. Conflict and tension: Our dealings with other people, the environment, ourselves. Plot: what happens in the course of a day or outing or whatever it is we want to write about. Theme: What we take out of our experience. Character transformation: We are changed by everything that happens in our lives.
Writing a personal essay is, at its simplest, telling a good story. It’s a commentary on the human condition, told through a personal story.
So maybe rather than worrying about whether or not we have an interesting enough life to warrant a personal essay, we worry more about weaving a story around our lives that, though specific, feels universal to the human condition. We look at the stories we’re telling about our lives. We examine where themes slide in and where conflict throws rocks on the road and where we might be most changed, and then we tell it all for the understanding and recognition it might bring.
There are millions of blogs out in cyberspace. How we make a mark in all their minutiae is to tell something that matters to us and the rest of humanity. Even if we’re writing about surviving the time when our son was diagnosed with a heart murmur, as long as we’re writing about the emotions of that experience, other parents suffering through their own child-scares will find value in it. When we work through our emotions on a page, we make our personal stories mean something to others.
I tell personal stories all the time. I use them to demonstrate a larger point, because it’s only after I’ve reflected on my personal stories and tried to find a common theme in humanity, tried to find where the story fits in the world, that I feel I can effectively share that story with the world’s people.
So, you see, it’s not about whether or not we’re interesting at all. It’s really about how well we can spread our experience into the experience of others.
Week’s prompt
