What Happened and What You Came to Say Are Not the Same Thing
You write down where you went and what happened in order, and it looks like a finished piece. Read it again a few days later and nothing stays. The scene is still alive for you, which is exactly why the gap is hard to see. This is not an argument against diaries. A diary works with an audience of one; an essay does not.
In The Situation and the Story (2001), Vivian Gornick writes that every work has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer, the insight, the thing one has come to say. A draft that stalls at diary level has the situation and no story.
So before the draft, write two lines. What happened, and what I am trying to say about it. If the second line will not come, you have picked a subject but not yet a piece. Push on anyway and you will end up manufacturing a moral in the last paragraph.
Take the Material From What Is Not Finished Yet
A settled experience gives you little to write. If you know why you did it and you already know what you think about it now, all that is left is explaining the conclusion. Readers learn from explanation, but they do not go through anything.
What still nags at you, by contrast, has a place in it the writer does not understand, and that is the place a reader follows. So look at the memories you have not tidied up before the ones you have. If three of the five below are true, the material usually holds.
- Does it still catch on something when you think of it now
- Do you judge it differently now than you did then
- Does it come out slightly differently each time you tell it
- Is there a passage where the story does not flatter you
- Can it open on a single scene
Put the Scene in Front and the Thought Behind It
Lead with the thought and the reader has two moves left: agree, or disagree. Show the scene first and the reader is standing there with you, taking the thought that follows as their own. Change nothing but the order and the same material reads differently.
A scene needs little. When, where, one thing you noticed, one line that was said. Instead of naming the feeling with an adjective, name the object the feeling was attached to. Write that you were sad and the reader may or may not believe you; write the soup that had gone cold and the reader gets there alone.
The summing up is not late if it comes after the scene. A reader who has seen the scene will be waiting for it.
Intimacy Is Not the Amount You Disclose
In the introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay (1994), Phillip Lopate writes that the hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy, that the writer seems to be speaking directly into your ear. What makes a personal essay personal, in other words, is not how private the subject is but how close the voice stands.
Mistake that intimacy for disclosure and the piece goes strange. The more you unbury, the further the reader steps back, because their seat has changed from conversation to spectacle. What brings a reader close is not revelation but posture. Leaving an unsettled judgement unsettled, and putting the fact that does not flatter you first, sounds far closer than a confession.
A piece with other people in it needs one more line. Cut the real name, the workplace, the incident only that person could recognise. If the story survives the cut, the cut was right. If the story disappears with it, the problem is not the sentences: that is a piece you have to ask the person about first.
Take the Moral Out of the Last Paragraph
Looking again is not the same as drawing a lesson. Looking again means writing down what you know now and did not then. A lesson extends that to everyone else. The first belongs to the writer and the second to the reader, and when the last paragraph takes the reader's half too, there is nothing left for them to do.
Two endings are enough. One is to call back an object or a line from the opening scene; the piece shuts at the point where the same thing looks different. The other is to leave what is unresolved unresolved. People do not end their days on tidy conclusions.
When you revise, let it sit a day and then reread only the first and last paragraphs. That is where the work usually is. Strip the summary out of the opening and the moral out of the close, and most of what sits between can stay as it is. If the last line still keeps swelling, there is a scene you have not written yet.
Frequently asked questions
Where does a diary end and an essay begin?
The reader draws the line. A diary works with one reader, so the situation alone is fine. An essay is read by someone else, so it needs what the situation left behind. The test is one line long: is there anything here for a person who is not me? If not, it is still a diary. Once you find that line, the paragraph that needs work is usually the first, not the last.
What do I do with the parts I remember only vaguely?
Write them vaguely. One line saying you do not remember exactly costs the piece no credibility; it adds some. The danger is filling the gap plausibly. Invent the dialogue and the piece has quietly changed genre, and if even one person was in the room, the sentences around it come under suspicion too. Check what can be checked. Dates, places and quotations usually turn up if you look.