(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)

What struck me most was not the punchlines or the details, but the act of slowing down. Of listening deeply. Of acknowledging that these moments are finite. We will not always have the people who matter most to us, but we can hold onto their stories.

And that, in many ways, is where compelling storytelling begins: with the willingness to notice the moments that sparkle.

Every writer has experienced this challenge: You know something meaningful happened in your life, or in your family, or in your childhood, but when you try to turn it into a story, it lies flat on the page. You can feel its importance, yet the translation from life to narrative is murky.

This is where the concept of the Sparkling Moment comes in.

A sparkling moment is a tiny, vivid memory—positive, resonant, emotional, or simply alive, that captures something essential. It’s not the whole story. It’s the spark that leads to the story.

The exercise comes from a chapter in my book A Story For Everything, and I’ve used it for years to help both new and experienced writers find clarity and contour in their narratives. It’s simple, it’s surprisingly powerful, and it teaches you two skills at once: how to listen and how to shape.

Below is the core exercise, and then we’ll break down how to use it in your writing practice.

Step One: The One-Minute Story

With a partner (or a voice recorder if you’re working alone), tell a very short true story, something happy, positive, or meaningful that can be told in 60 seconds. It could be something from childhood. Or something from this morning. The smaller the moment, the better.

Examples often sound like:

• “My daughter finally rode her bike without training wheels today.”
• “My grandfather taught me how to fold a fitted sheet when I was ten.”
• “Yesterday, a stranger paid for my coffee and it shifted my whole day.”

These are memories, not epics. They’re sparks.

If you’re working with a partner, have them listen fully without interrupting. Their only job is to be present. If you stall out before the minute is up, they can encourage you with gentle prompts like “Go on” or “Tell me more,” but they should avoid asking questions that steer the story.

Step Two: The Retelling

This is where the magic happens.

After you finish your one-minute story, your partner retells the same story back to you, from memory.

Sometimes I ask the reteller to speak in first person, as if it were their own story. Other times, I ask them to retell it exactly as heard. Either way, the real work is happening not in the retelling, but in your listening.

When you hear your own story told back to you, you immediately notice:

• Which details they remembered.
• Which details they dropped.
• Which parts they emphasized.
• Which parts surprised you.
• Which emotional beats landed without you trying.

This is live, instantaneous feedback on how your storytelling is being received.

Writers spend so much time inside their own heads, shaping sentences and rearranging paragraphs, that they often forget a story is a two-way experience. Someone else has to hear it, understand it, and feel something from it. The Sparkling Moment exercise shows you exactly how much of your story is actually crossing that bridge.

In workshops, I don’t reveal this retelling step ahead of time. Inevitably, listeners laugh and groan when I tell them they’re going to have to retell the story, because most weren’t truly listening. They were half-listening and half-preparing their own story for when it would be their turn to talk.

Sound familiar?

Writers often do the same thing: Instead of staying inside the moment, they jump mentally to what’s next. Instead of sitting in the sparkling memory, they try to build the whole narrative arc before they even understand what the story is really about.

Listening is not passive. It is generative.

Step Three: Identify the Emotional Pivot

Once you hear your story reflected back to you, ask yourself:  Where did the story change?

Every compelling story has a pivot; the moment when something shifts. It might be tiny. It might be emotional rather than external. But it’s the pivot that gives the story meaning.

In the restaurant last week, my dad told a story about a painting he kept in his dental office for years, an image of the Patron Saint of Dentistry. He originally bought it from another dentist; recently, he passed it down to his nephew (my cousin), who is also a dentist. On the surface, it’s a simple story about a painting changing hands. But as he spoke, the emotional pivot became clear. It wasn’t about the sale at all. It was about passing the torch. It was about tradition, and pride, and the “spirit” of the profession he devoted his life to. The painting itself was an object, but its transfer from one generation to the next revealed continuity, identity, and legacy.

The pivot is where the story stops being a list of events and becomes an experience.

When you identify that pivot, you’ve found the beating heart of the story.

Step Four: Add Reflection

A true event becomes a compelling story when you add reflection, when you connect the moment to something larger.

Reflection answers the question:

Why does this story matter?

It doesn’t need to be profound. You don’t need to have learned a grand lesson. But you do need to articulate meaning.

Look back at your sparkling moment and ask:

• What did this reveal about me?
• What changed?
• What do I understand now that I didn’t then?
• Why did this moment stay with me?

Reflection turns memory into narrative. It’s where the sparkle becomes illumination.

Step Five: Expand the Edges

Now you have everything you need:

• A vivid moment.
• A clear emotional pivot.
• A meaningful reflection.

All that’s left is expanding the edges, adding just enough context and detail to immerse the reader without burying the moment.

Most writers do the opposite. They start with too much backstory or setup, drowning the scene before the reader ever finds what’s important. The Sparkling Moment exercise reverses that instinct. It makes you start with the moment that matters most, then build outward with intention.

The Spark Is the Story

Sitting around that dinner table with my parents and brothers reminded me that storytelling is not a performance; it is preservation. We talked for hours, savoring stories we’ve told before and discovering ones we’d forgotten. And as I listened, I felt something that has stayed with me since: These sparkling moments, once spoken aloud, become the way we hold onto each other.

A story doesn’t have to be big to be unforgettable. It only has to be true, told with presence, and anchored in the moment where something shifted.

You don’t need to be a “natural storyteller.”

You just need to notice your sparkling moments, and let them shine.

Check out Corey Rosen’s A Story for Everything here:

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(6 Types of Personal Essays to Try.)

My debut essay collection, Uncanny Valley Girls, is mainly not about books. A mix of memoir and criticism, it’s about survival and interpersonal relationships, using horror movies—another early obsession—to think through the ways art can save and vex us in equal measure. In other words, it’s a book about love, in all its complex valiances. But I couldn’t write it without this other foundation in literature, both the interiority I found in memoir and poetry and the rigorous critical eye I found in theory.

Because really, both these modes of writing saved me. “My silences had not protected me,” Audre Lorde famously wrote. “Your silence will not protect you.”

In memoir and creative nonfiction, I found the commitment to truth-telling that led me to believe my own truth could be told, the importance of sharing experiences with violence—sexual, physical, structural—and their aftermath. Through foundational authors like Lorde to contemporary writers like Melissa Febos, Johanna Hedva, and Elissa Washuta, I discovered ways to document said experiences and their bright aftermaths, the way hope can be practiced even in the wake of structural harm without negating the reality of said harm. Through these authors and others, I found the fortitude to end my own silence.

Uncanny Valley Girls is a book concerned with enduring pain, but it is also a book concerned with how to make a life we can live within. In it, I write: “The miraculous thing about a wound, after all, is not its capacity to heal. Many wounds do no such thing. The miracle is our capacity to live and love despite this wounding.” It was important for me to think—and feel—through my life to highlight this living and loving, and memoir was the most immediate way for me to do so at the time.

But as I wrote the book, I also was interested in thinking holistically and expansively about the media we consume. The essay collection is focused on horror, which for my money is the genre most concerned with violence’s aftermath—which, given the inescapability of violence between people in an unequal society, makes it the genre most concerned with intimacy and relationality as well. In Uncanny Valley Girls, I use horror as a mirror into my own life—a disabled trans woman in relationships with other disabled trans people, someone who had to construct a previously nonexistent faith in community in order to survive. The book itself is an act of community-construction too, a way to solidify and think through the ties that allowed me to live.

Though while I draw from memoir to construct this community, I also am interested in the long history of feminist and queer horror criticism as a form of truth-telling, too. Some of these works of criticism I draw from I cite explicitly—Julia Kristeva’s seminal monograph Powers of Horror, Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting,” Willow Catelyn Maclay’s trans reading of the pubescent werewolf movie Ginger Snaps. And some of my other antecedents, including Carol J. Clover’s equally seminal Men, Women and Chainsaws and Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, I only allude to. Regardless, given the existing brilliance of so many horror scholars, I was interested in writing a book with a robust citational practice—a book that, in addition to conveying the emotional and material truth of how art can save a life, also engaged that art with intellectual rigor.

Which is, of course, something that Lorde believed in, too. Throughout her collected essays—Sister Outsider most famously, but also my favorite book of hers, A Burst of Light—she cites rigorously and widely, documenting a reading and thinking life. Even in constructing this essay, I built a false dichotomy; for all the memoirists and essayists who have most inspired me have similarly substantiative citational practices too. The thing about being saved by books is that it’s a recursive sort of salvation; books almost always point to other books, too. Even as I was engaging with film, which I do throughout the whole essay collection—good movies and bad movies, movies I hate that almost everyone else I know loves (like Black Swan) and movies I sometimes feel I’m a singular defender of (like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist)—I couldn’t keep other books and writers out. I love them too much not to include them. In giving me models for a writing and thinking life outside of the bounds of my own town, they helped me live, too.

In her essay “Believing in Literature” from her essay collection Skin, the lesbian feminist working-class writer Dorothy Allison, a creative and political lodestar of mine, talked about her own motivation for writing. She said: “What did I want? I wanted the thing all writers want—for the world to break open in response to my story. I wanted to be understood finally for who I believe myself to be, for the difficulty and grief of using my own pain to be justified.”

I see this same motivation in theory, which is concerned with understanding the world through understanding and analyzing texts; and I see the same motivation in memoir, too, which is concerned with understanding the world through understanding the self. They’re both searching for the same understanding, which I tried to capture in Uncanny Valley Girls as well. How could I not? I wrote a book about survival, using the tools from memoir and criticism that allowed me to survive in the first place. It’s only through both, after all, that I was able to see my life in its full, shining wholeness. It’s only through both that I was able to break open my own world just a little, that I was able to live.

Check out Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls here:

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(In Praise of Writing the Small Story.)

Maybe it was a few years after that, during my repeated conversations with college friends about my experiences on the equestrian team. Maybe it was my senior year of college, when I took a course called Writing the Athletic Body with the writer Anelise Chen, and wrote about horses and race for every assignment. When I try to identify an origin story for my book, I realize that there is no linear timeline but simply a series of spiraling and overlapping moments of obsession.

Mounted is about the shared entanglements between Black people and horses, exploring interspecies connection through the stories of cowboys, dancehall artists, pop singers, protestors, fugitive slaves, visual artists, and pony book characters. In 12 essays, it spans several hundred years of history and various forms of media from children’s literature to film and textile art. The book arose from my own experiences as a Black equestrian and horse lover, who began riding horses as a child at a local stable in Brooklyn, New York.

Throughout my life, I have kept returning to horses. Whether through riding or archival research or art, I have found myself unable to let go of the complex significance of horses and their histories. So much of my writing is inspired by the things I can’t stop talking about, the themes and questions that I am pulled back to when I am least expecting it, the feeling of being given a spiritual assignment that I cannot be finished with until it is finished with me.

My writing process is informed by the storytelling forms of those who refuse the neat and the linear, by oral practices that revel in the juiciness of a story unfolding, then folding back on itself. Obsession takes up space and time, defying the tyranny of the clean, intelligible narrative. I have been taught by those who are people of repetition and excess: queers, immigrant mothers, the various sidewalk scholars and self-appointed preachers of Brooklyn. My writing has been shaped by the groupchat, the two-hour phone call, the grocery store reportback, the pamphlet manifesto, the updates about people I have never met. The same sentiment repeated 10 different ways, each time with a new wisdom and cadence.

As Hanif Abdurraqib has written, “I’m not all that interested in repetition or return as a vehicle for correction, or to make things ‘right’…I get obsessive about my returns because there are places…where I know for certain that I have left behind a sweetness, and I am interested in seeing how it has grown in my absence.”

There is a sweetness in so many of my early interactions with horses: the silver horse pendant dangling from a suede necklace, the cowboy boots I wore to my first riding lesson, the curiosity with which I approached my relationships with the school ponies at the stable. Even as this sweetness became complicated by knowledge about the role of horses in policing and colonial economies, I still reached for stories of the layered intimacies and forms of resistance practiced by Black people who rode and cared for horses. I return to horses because I know that I must, because I know there are parts of myself I have left lingering on bridles in dusty saddle rooms and tucked between the pages of Saddle Club books and stored in digital folders full of 19th-century images of Black people and the horses they loved, and I want to see what has transpired in my absence.

My creative practice of obsession is one that lives in the body, informed by aesthetic lineages of the African diaspora. As James Snead wrote in the essay “On Repetition in Black Culture,” “In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.’…it continually cuts back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as a…willed return to a prior series.”

Snead is referring to sonic and literary traditions such as the repetition displayed in jazz music and African-American folklore. However, I would also describe this as a philosophy, one that emphasizes the unfolding and layering of memories and experiences over time. It’s a practice where each return is an opportunity to elaborate on an argument, listen to something from a different angle, or check in on the sweetness you left behind.

To obsess is to refuse enforced forgetting, to allow yourself to be moved by what haunts you, to sit in the mess of what has been rather than rushing forward in the name of progress. Many of my essays are woven together from months’ and sometimes years’ worth of phone notes, screenshots, quotes, are.na tiles, found images, and links. I have learned to allow my obsessions their rightful time and to trust in this stubborn and sticky recursiveness, this inherited commitment to memory-keeping, knowing that the things I simply can’t let go of will teach me something about the stories I must tell.

Check out Bitter Kalli’s Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation here:

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“Nothing extraordinary has ever happened to me.”

“I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading about that.”

These are some common hesitations shared by nonfiction writers worried that they have not had remarkable enough lives to engage readers’ attention. Yet most of our lives are not comprised of a series of extravagant events, but rather a compilation of small moments that nonetheless have large personal and political impacts.

(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)

My latest book, Abbreviate, is a small collection of small essays that examines big ideas, like how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept and even claim small spaces and stories. Though the essays in this collection focus on everyday experiences—probing the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobing with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricocheting with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm—it is this commonality that reinforces the significance of the stories.

When I began writing Abbreviate, I wanted to write stories from my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that others deemed too small to be significant. These were the childhood experiences I tried to tell adults, only to be told little girls should be seen and not heard. These were the stories from my teenage years that shaped me irrevocably, but were deemed too commonplace to warrant much attention. And these were the experiences from my adulthood shared by many women yet silenced by a sexist society. Growing up, I shared many experiences with girls and women around me, as well as the experience of being told our stories were too small to matter. And so, it was these small stories that I wanted to praise.

~

Many readers of nonfiction turn to the genre looking for connection. While we certainly read to learn about lives unlike our own, we also read for the familiar, to see something of ourselves reflected in the pages, to witness a world that makes us feel a sense of unity rather than isolation. There is an inherent power in engaging with a stranger’s story and thinking, “Yes, I’ve felt that way too” or “I thought I was the only one.” We read nonfiction to feel a sense of wholeness, to feel as though we are a part of the larger human experience.

If we only focus our work on the extraordinary, however, we risk losing this quality. We risk alienating our readers. We risk missing the point of the genre entirely—the poignancy and power of the everyday. And we risk alienating ourselves from the narratives of our own lives, thinking instead that we are somehow not living or writing well if we are not exceptional.

Part of the craft of writing creative nonfiction is retraining ourselves to notice and appreciate small moments in our lives. Contemporary culture tends to favor extremes in news headlines, social media, and movies, so it can seem as though storytelling requires dramatic events. But there is as much narrative tension in the small moments of our lives as there is in these extremes, perhaps even more so, for what is higher stakes than the truth?

Learning to cultivate a sense of curiosity about small daily moments can begin anytime. Going through old photos, listening to music, reading old letters or emails, or reminiscing about particular periods in your life will naturally produce them. You do not need epiphanic revelation or a sudden stroke of artistic inspiration to locate a meaningful memory, image, or emotion. If a particular moment in your life, however small, is one that brought you pleasure, heartache, intrigue, or simply stands out strongly in your memory, then this is a good sign that it will do the same for readers. What matters is your willingness to notice, your belief that the minutia of your life matters, and your ability to reflect on what larger truths these small stories reveal.

For example, while Abbreviate contains extreme events, the majority of moments throughout the collection are brief flashes. Dramatic events like domestic violence, sexual assault, and abuse by authority figures juxtapose with small events like childhood games, teenage school projects, and adult trips to museums. The large events are certainly important to the narrative, but the smaller moments are equally important, perhaps even more so because of their unexpected narrative weight. While it was easy to reflect on significant moments of narrative tension in my life, it was more powerful to reflect on forgotten moments, and I found that lingering memories of elementary school classrooms and middle school dances gave way to more varied memories with greater thematic significance.

When we write about extremes, there’s often little opportunity for thematic surprise. Writing about my middle school principal running off with a student, for example, expectedly leads to outrage, shock, violation. But writing about small moments provides narrative flexibility and many opportunities for thematic exploration. Writing about building a life-size model of a refrigerator for a middle school project, for example, foreshadowed the disordered eating many girls I grew up with experienced later as adults. Surprising yourself with the power of the small will naturally surprise your reader.

Click to continue.

Small moments can also lend themselves to creating stronger thematic connections. For example, when writing about domestic violence, which eventually led to my aunt’s husband running over his ex-wife, an image of my aunt teaching me to play with stomp rockets, launching them up into the air and far away to safety provided more interesting images, metaphoric opportunity, and thematic resonance, than writing about my uncle directly. Since I was a child when this event took place, it also makes sense to write about childhood memories of play, rather than the adult events I didn’t fully understand at the time. When reflecting on my uncle, the memory of his violence always surfaces, but it was remembering my childhood play that allowed me access to writing about this difficult subject and with a more nuanced approach.

Once you have determined which small moments were impactful, it is then time to use them thematically. Remember, readers engage with nonfiction not simply for the plot, but for a larger reflection about the human experience, so it is not enough simply to share specific memories. Instead, you must work to make greater meaning beyond these memories, to use these recollections as the impetus for or the lens through which you create deeper reflection.

Many times, the small experiences or images that you have chosen to write about will lead you directly to larger themes. You might find that writing about quilting with your grandmother as a child lends itself to themes about piecing together your family history as an adult. You might find that writing about playing with dolls as a girl lends itself to larger themes about motherhood. Moving beyond the memory can be as simple as asking yourself what this memory taught you about the world or how this memory foreshadowed what was to come later in your life.

Other times, you might find that your themes come first. When we begin with themes rather than plot, it can sometimes be difficult to know how best to illustrate these themes. But turning to the small moments in our lives can give us a sense of direction. For example, in Abbreviate, I wanted to examine the rise of sexism in America, as well as the ways women have been erased from history. I did so by focusing on small moments from my past like how elementary boys learned bullying techniques from adult men or the ways a girlhood visit to a planetarium revealed few women constellating the sky. Reverse engineering allows us to sift through the card catalogs of our minds to locate specific examples that might illustrate the larger points we are trying to make. Remember, these memories don’t need to speak directly to the themes. Sometimes it is best if they provide emotional weight, rather than direct commentary.

To create deeper meaning from your memories, you can also either implement direct comparisons or utilize juxtapositions. You might share specific small moments to reflect directly on a related topic. For example, in Abbreviate, I share stories of being required to apologize, smile, or hug people even when I didn’t want to in order to reflect on the ways girls and women are taught to conceal their true emotions for the ease of others. Direct comparisons strengthen both the specific memory and the larger thematic weight, allowing readers to fully engage with each.

On the other hand, you can also create deeper meaning from your memories by using stark contrast. By juxtaposing a specific memory with a seemingly unrelated larger theme, you employ the element of surprise for readers, moving the reading experience beyond expectation and toward originality. For example, describing learning to play Dungeons & Dragons in the wake of our current political climate allowed me to reflect on the ways men seek to control even women’s minds and imaginations. Contrast allows both you and your reader to move beyond the expected, and to be reminded of the power of the genre and the ability of our lives to move in surprising ways.

~

“I can’t believe I never noticed that before.”

“Even after all these years, I still remember that.”

“I never realized how much that tiny moment impacted me.”

Growing up, many of the girls and women around me believed their stories and selves too small. And yet, if we had only shared our small stories, we might have understood their significance in our lives and in the lives of others, might have seen our connection, might have realized our individual and collective power. By claiming space on the page, we might have learned to claim space in the real world, might have demanded more for ourselves and each other, might have stretched ourselves in search of all that we desired and might one day achieve. In recognizing the power of the small, we might have recognized our ability to tell stories larger than we ever imagined.

Check out Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate here:

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I am about to introduce you to one of my favorite student essays. Maybe my absolute favorite. There is a story behind it. Over many years, I have worked with a public school teacher named Holly Slaughter. She is an expert on teaching reading and writing, a published author, and a leader for teachers at the elementary school level. Holly has two daughters, and the younger one, Emme, was working on her college admissions essay. She wanted to join her older sister at the University of Florida. Now Holly knows how to coach writers of all ages, but as sometimes happens in families, Emme preferred not to be coached by her mom. That’s where I came in.

(How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay That Works.)

Emme sent me a draft of her story. I read it once; I read it again, thinking of ways I might help her improve the draft. I read it a third time. Then I messaged Emme and her mom. “It’s perfect,” I told them. “I have no changes to suggest. If UF reads this and does not accept you, you don’t want to be there.”

What was all the hubbub about? See if this essay excites you as much as it did me.

She Wants to Be an Astrophysicist: Get Used to It

By Emme Slaughter

(650 words)

Two years ago, I won my family’s Fantasy Football League. To many this may not seem like a highly esteemed accomplishment. But if you were to ask me how I felt, I would have told you I won the actual Super Bowl.

I eagerly began to count down the days until Christmas, excited not for the holiday itself, but instead because I would get to see my entire family gathered at one long dinner table. Put in more accurate terms, I would be surrounded by people who had all just suffered defeat to the youngest member of the family. I was ecstatic.

My whole life, I had spent every Sunday and Monday night sitting on the very edge of my couch with my dad, ready to leap out of my seat and cheer at any play that gained over 30 yards. I memorized all the penalties, all my favorite players’ names, and became my mom’s favorite person to ask when she got a football question on her Sunday crossword.

So, when I walked into Nana and Poppa’s on Christmas with a big grin on my face, exuberant to talk about my team’s flawless fantasy season, I was not expecting the response from my oldest cousin, Josh: “How could we get beaten by a girl?” My heart sank as ripples of laughter, mostly from my boy cousins and uncles, echoed throughout the room.

While my response to Josh should have been a confident “Get used to it,” my fifteen-year-old self could not muster a word. I tried to hold back tears. Was I embarrassed? And why? I now know that what I was feeling was shame, rooted in the message that a woman could never be more knowledgeable than a man at football, or anything for that matter.

The way that I view the world changed on that day. I became heightened in my awareness of gender roles and societal perceptions, especially as I explored my future in STEM. In my AP physics class, I couldn’t help but notice that I was part of a very small portion of girls in a male-dominated class.

Between freshman and sophomore year, I was invited to attend an engineering camp at a state university. Excited, I listened to the camp leaders share the agenda for the week, including all kinds of engineering activities and competitions. We would build marshmallow launchers, attend lectures, and kick off the camp with the ultimate competition: science trivia.

I remember looking around the room and noticing the majority of male students. I found myself allowing the implicit message to seep into my brain: boys are naturally better than girls at science. Wasn’t the very make‑up of the room showing me just that? I blocked out everything and focused on answering the questions at break-neck speed. Later, when I held the pineapple-shaped trivia championship trophy above my head, all of my fellow campers, boys and girls, were screaming and cheering me on.

Today, I have taken Marie Curie as my role model, and just as she did, I strive to be the best in everything I do regardless of whom I compete against. Curie discovered radium. She observed that radiation wasn’t dependent on the organization of atoms at a molecular level; something was happening inside the atom itself. The atom is not inert, indivisible, or solid.

Like Curie’s discovery, something has happened inside me, deeper than the molecular level. There have been times that I have been shaken and so unsure of myself that I was unwilling to speak. And times when I have felt indivisible and unstoppable. I am growing to understand that it does not matter whether I am attempting to succeed in a career dominated by men, because my mind and actions are completely independent of those around me. For those who doubt me along the way, I say, just wait and see. And get used to it.

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THIS ESSAY

It’s the essay only Emme could write.

It has a catchy title. This essay has a title and a brief subtitle, both of which tell us something about the writer. If you have a catchy title that attracts the interest of the reader and also captures the main message of the essay, you are in great shape. Notice that her desire to become an astrophysicist is never mentioned in the story. But she doesn’t have to because that title is like something on a billboard or a movie house marquee. The title tells, and the story shows. Meanwhile, the subtitle, “Get used to it,” is a brilliant use of a catchphrase that expresses the strong voice of the writer. Notice that she uses it three times — which in writing is always a magic number. She uses it in the subtitle, in the middle, and then again at the end. You plant it, you water it, you harvest it.

It has spirit. Sam’s story had a playful spirit. Emme’s essay has spirit, too, from first word to last. Sam is a romantic. Emme is a warrior princess, someone who is determined, indefatigable (which means she is tireless!) with her eyes on the prize. She has heart, which she displays in the most casual settings, and the most serious ones.

It has a focus. One way to tell if an essay has focus is to try to summarize the meaning in as few words as possible. She does the trick with the title, but supports it throughout: “I am a determined young woman whose vocation is to work in a field now dominated by boys and men. It doesn’t matter if you approve or not. Here I come.”

It reveals her character and her knowledge base. When I read the essay, I drew immediate conclusions about what kind of person the writer is. From the evidence of the text, I would use these adjectives: intelligent, curious, determined, focused, versatile, sensitive, clever, organized, and literate. She could have referenced Shakespeare rather than Madame Curie, but she makes the good decision to reveal the knowledge base she wanted to pursue. And it gets brainier and brainier. In that sense our author, intelligent throughout these 650 words, reveals her intelligence in stages. It is obvious that colleges and universities want to accept brainy young people, and the readers of this essay will get a good insight into what this student already knows and what kind of learner she is likely to be.

Its use of detail

It has vivid scenes. The first scene is at a family Christmas dinner, where the boys shame each other for losing to a girl. It includes that snippet of dialogue. Her disappointment in that moment is neutralized in the second scene where she lifts the trophy. I love the fact that she includes the detail that the trophy is shaped like a pineapple.

It shows and it tells. In kindergarten, I learned the game show-​and-​tell. I would bring in an object from home and tell the class a story about it. Never did I think that it would lead to a lesson I would use in my writing for a lifetime. Emme tells us about boys thinking that they are better in science than girls, and she also shows us that bias in action. She tells us about how she grew in her confidence, and we see it when she holds up the trophy. Show and tell.

It has a great backup singer. My analogy of the backup singer refers to any person, living or dead, famous or not, whom you quote or refer to in your essay. Our young author chooses a brilliant one: Madame Curie, one of the most famous scientists in history — and, of course, a woman.

It moves from popular culture to science. It is so much fun to witness that journey this writer takes us on, from a family gathering focusing on football and popular culture to lessons at the end about her knowledge of science.

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Its use of language

It reveals the power of two. The number of examples a writer uses has meaning. When a writer uses two examples, they are asking the reader to compare and contrast. In that sense, Emme offers two moments of triumph: the football pool and the science trivia contest. They are alike, but different.The first one leaves her disappointed because the boys reveal a belief that they are or should be better than girls. In the second, she is cheered and celebrated by all.

It climbs up and down the ladder of language. The writer uses two different types of language. Words that make us think, and words that help us see. Words about ideas, and words about things. A phrase about ideas, such as “awareness of gender roles and societal perceptions” is high on the ladder. But words lower on the ladder, such as “marshmallow launchers” and “pineapple-​shaped . . . trophy” are things we can see and hold in our hands.

It makes good use of white space. OK, I fibbed just a little. The essay wasn’t perfect. I did make one suggestion to improve it. I thought, in her original version, Emme’s paragraphs were a bit too long. There is nothing wrong with good long paragraphs, except for this: They are harder to read than shorter ones. You know that a sentence ends with a period. But you may not have thought that a paragraph ends with a period followed by white space. That white space helps the reader relax. The reader can see the parts better. If a reader sees a 650-​word paragraph, they assume that the meaning, like the visual text, is dense and difficult to plod through.

It has a transformative journey.

It reveals how she overcomes obstacles. It turns out that a character’s ability to overcome obstacles remains an enduring pattern in storytelling, one that has existed from the earliest examples of Western literature. You may have heard of an ancient epic called the Odyssey, in which it takes the hero ten years to find his way home after the Trojan War. Or think of everything that Harry Potter must suffer, including the murder of his parents when he was an infant, before he can overcome the ultimate evil. The famous novelist Kurt Vonnegut advises writers to create a likable character and then spend five hundred pages doing terrible things to him. The idea is to see what the hero is made of. In Emme Slaughter’s case, she has 650 words, not 650 pages, but we see what she is made of — in her family and in her education — by overcoming traditional obstacles placed in the path of women’s achievement.

It ups the ante. Emme’s essay moves in lots of ways. One move is from less serious to more serious. She wins in a fantasy football league. Then she wins at a science camp. Then she chooses Marie Curie, one of history’s most famous scientists, as a role model. This is clearly a resilient young woman who would thrive in a demanding academic environment.

It has a strong ending. I think of a good ending as a gold coin the writer gives the reader for making the journey. Thanks for reading all the way through. This reward is for you. What makes Emme’s ending so strong is that she has foreshadowed it, beginning with the title and then building steam through the text.

Epilogue: The world of science, from the time Emme was a little girl, imposed obstacle after obstacle to her achieving her dreams.

Paul Cottle, a physics professor at Florida State University, writes about how few women wind up in his engineering, math, and computer science classes. The number can be as low as one in five, even though many universities are more than 60 percent female. That last data point may make it harder for women to get into schools that do not want a great imbalance between women and men.

I caught up with Emme’s work at the University of Florida, the college of her choice. As a sophomore, she earned a  position as a research assistant to a science professor. She wrote in a text: “Yes, we will be doing biosignature detection using gas chromatography-​mass spectrometry with the Mars Rover and other landers!! And then doing field work and running rock samples through the GC‑MS system here and comparing them with the samples we get from the Rover data to search for evidence of life beyond Earth!! I start tomorrow.” It appears the young woman, whose boy cousins mocked her in her youth, is living her dream to become an astrophysicist.

So far you have seen the essay by Sam French, which reveals his wit, his charm, and his intelligence. Then you met Emme Slaughter, who shows us her brains, her commitment, and her determination. I did not coach either Sam or Emme, even though I have known their families since they were young children. Both have the advantage of being born into families where reading and writing are very important. Sam is the son of a prize-​winning journalist and an outstanding high school English teacher. I have worked with Emme’s mom, Holly Slaughter, who is a leader among language arts teachers in the public schools. I think it’s cool that neither Sam nor Emme sought out their parents for help when it came time to write their essay. Each wrote the essay that only they could write.

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Credit line: Excerpted from WRITING TOOLS FOR THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS ESSAY by Roy Peter Clark. Copyright © 2025 by Roy Peter Clark.  Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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Want an opportunity to win a WD award? Keep checking our competitions page for upcoming competitions.

1. “How to Read Your Work Aloud” by Sonja Livingston
2. “Borrowed Time in Wild Places” by Heide Brandes
3. “I Came Here to Burn” by Cheryl Kelley
4. “Passthrough” by Cheryl Kelley
5. “Mouth Full of Grass, Facing East” by Karen Bellerose
6. “Singing in the Valley of Death” by William Ablan
7. “When a Tree Falls..” by P. James Norris
8. “The Year I Wrote Myself Back” by Kathryn M. Bowman Johnson
9. “the wolf” by Cheryl Kelley
10. “Magpie at the Mirror” by Nadia Alavosius
11. “The Empty Tattoo” by Elizabeth Ciufo
12. “My Belly’s Breathing” by M.K. Been
13. “Mugwort” by JoAnn Stevelos
14. “Lying Down with Wolves” by Laurie Paternoster
15. “The Moonlight Hotel” by Charles Lutz
16. “Sounds of Freedom” by Kiki Cunningham
17. “Until” by Kelly Stallard
18. “When My Secrets Were No Longer Mine” by Jean Romano
19. “Girlfriend ~ the short and longing of it” by Mo Conlan
20. “What Sisters Do” by Rebekah Rossman
21. “The Rock” by Christine Cameron
22. “Crystal, Clear” Gordon Portman
23. “That First Night” by Bari Benjamin
24. “The El Salvadorian Motorcycle Accident” by Michael Fitzer
25. “Unchosen” by Cheryl Kelley

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“If you are a younger writer struggling to find work, do not take on more debt by seeking some advanced degree in some writing-related area. It will not make you more money.” –Michael Arceneaux, author of I Finally Bought Some Jordans (HarperOne)

“Don’t count on sticking to your timeline. Give yourself at least double the amount of time you thought it would take! And as part of this, have other sources of income to get you through the process.” –Solomon Brager, author of Heavyweight: A Family Story of Holocaust, Empire, and Memory (William Morrow Paperbacks)

“Make sure you have or develop a rich inner life. That’s the wellspring of creativity.” –Lester Fabian Brathwaite, author of Rage: On Being Queer, Black, Brilliant…and Completely Over It (Tiny Reparations)

“Grind, grind, grind! There are so many hurdles and reasons to feel self-doubt that it takes a single-mindedness and ultimately blind faith to push through and do the work day-in, day-out.” –Jonathan Butler, author of Join the Conspiracy: How a Brooklyn Eccentric Got Lost on the Right, Infiltrated the Left, and Brought Down the Biggest Bombing Network in New York (Fordham University Press)

“Keep going. There are so many moments where you come back to what you wrote and just want to tear it all up. You start to think perhaps no one cares what you have to say or maybe it’s all been said before. But there are people waiting for you to write in your tone, with your experience, and we have to almost recite this to ourselves daily as we write. So, show up and let what’s there come to the page—without editing. Editing is for later, in my opinion. In the beginning, our only job is to be in our creative space, and write.” –Yasmine Cheyenne, author of Wisdom of the Path (Harper One)

“There is so much good advice out there already! And often, for whatever reason (Platitude!) (I don’t need advice!) (Please, that advice-giver wants to make a Muppet movie!), I failed to really heed that advice. But anyway, here’s a piece of advice that I think my younger self could have used: Don’t worry about knowing exactly what you want to say. Trust that what you want to say—even if you don’t know what it is—needs to be said, and eventually, inevitably, will be. And trust that you do have something to say. Everyone has something to say. Just keep writing. Just keep writing. As you draft and revise, perhaps for what feels like an eternity (It is an eternity. (An eternity exists in every moment.)), whatever needs to be said, you will eventually say.” –Matthew J. C. Clark, author of Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences (University of Iowa Press)

“I’m still pretty new to this, so I will be taking much more advice than I will be giving for a while. But I can say this for sure: Details are what drove me. If you over-report, ask unimportant questions alongside the important ones, jot down seemingly useless observations as often as possible, the story has a way of writing itself.” –Will Cockrell, author of Everest, Inc. (Gallery Books)

“I spent much too much of my life not quite understanding that the people who I admired—writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, athletes, whomever—were real people. It took me forever (far too long) to realize that a filmmaker was simply someone who made a film; a novelist wasn’t some elevated being, they were a person who’d written a novel. If you want to be a writer, just write. If you want to be a great writer, keep writing.” –Nate DiMeo, author of The Memory Palace: True Short Stories of the Past (Random House)

“I would ask them how they balance what they want to tell people with what the reader is looking for.” –Ronald Drabkin, author of Beverly Hills Spy: The Double-Agent War Hero and Spy Who Helped Japan Attack Pearl Harbor (William Morrow)

“Keep writing.” –T.J. English, author of The Last Kilo (William Morrow)

“Don’t be afraid to share your unfinished drafts with trusted loved ones. My wife’s early reads were a gut check on whether I was heading in the right direction. She also flagged sections that dragged or where there wasn’t enough context for the average reader to follow along.” –Mike Hixenbaugh, author of They Came for the Schools: One Town’s Fight Over Race and Identity, and the New War for America’s Classrooms (Mariner Books)

“I have one piece of advice for those interested in writing a biography or a story with a historical background: It is critically important to conduct thorough research. Don’t leave any stone unturned in trying to discover what gems might be hidden in the information you collect. Conduct interviews, read novels from the period, collect pictures, testimonies, and official documents; tour the site of the events and do whatever else you can to shed light on the character, the setting in which she lived, and the central events (public and private) of her life. The more you invest in research, the better the writing process will be.” –Zipora Klein Jacob, author of The Forbidden Daughter (HarperCollins)

“It helps to have a really, really strong ‘want.’ I really wanted to finish and sell my first novel, The Anatomy Book, and I sacrificed a lot for that dream. It didn’t come true, but that blind desire—and the discipline I developed because of it—was so strong it made a lot of other wonderful things happen. Have a specific goal and put everything towards it. I think the universe tends to meet you halfway if you do that.” –Sarah LaBrie, author of No One Gets to Fall Apart (HarperCollins)

“This question is so hard, and I’m afraid my answer is a cliché. But honestly, the thing that has helped me more than anything is just sitting down and making work. I spent so many years not making anything, because I was so scared it would suck. Or making a few things and then obsessively editing them, trying to get one thing exactly ‘right.’ For me, the transformative shift has been to make lots and lots of work, to make enough work that I can figure out what I’m trying to do before I go back and try to revise and refine it.” –Sarah Leavitt, author of Something, Not Nothing: A Story of Grief and Love (Arsenal Pulp Press)

“Find a writing community. Writing with others has been so helpful to me. Join a writing group and participate in an online community, which I did during COVID. Currently, I’m part of a text chain of authors with books coming out in 2024, and it’s been so helpful to go through the publishing process with others.” –Margaret Juhae Lee, author of Starry Field: A Memoir of Lost History (Melville House)

“If an internal voice is nagging at you saying, ‘You must get down to writing!’ ignore it. It has been around all your life, and it is not your friend. It never has been. Don’t worry about publication, praise, or productivity. Relax and find the courage to let go, trust the process, and let yourself enjoy the simple act of writing in each ordinary moment. That’s all there is.” –William Martin, author of The Daily Tao (Hachette Book Group)

“Persevere. If you feel compelled to write a story, it’s probably worth writing. I was often tempted to give up on this project. Writing is work, and I could think of a million reasons not to continue my efforts. In the end, I just couldn’t let it go.” –Cindy Miller, author of The Alterations Lady (Apollo Publishers)

“Dare to be different. As enticing as it might be to write about the same topics as everyone else, don’t be afraid to cover things that aren’t being covered. It may be a lonely road initially, but if you keep writing with force and sincerity, you’ll build a genuine fanbase. The world needs more writers willing to explore the unknown, because those are the stories that need to be told.” –Marcus J. Moore, author of High and Rising: A Book About De La Soul (Dey Street Books)

“Stop talking yourself out of your book dream. Stop asking ‘what if’ and filling in the answer with the worst-case scenarios, like ‘What if I can’t finish this?’ and ‘What if no one wants to publish it?’ Instead, start asking ‘what if’ and filling in the answer with the best possibilities: What if I finish writing this book and it’s great? What if it gets published and readers love it? What if I get the chance to write more books? The former will slow you down and make you doubt yourself; the latter will convince you to keep going.” –Christina Myers, author of Halfway Home: Thoughts from Midlife (House of Anansi)

“Don’t worry about pleasing an unknown child with your story. Write for the child that you once were—or better yet, for the child that you are.” –Yevgenia Nayberg, author of A Party for Florine: Florine Stettheimer and Me (Neal Porter Books)

“With this book, I learned that not only does my writing style grow and change with time, so does my process. I was shocked to discover that what got a book done in my 30s (staying up all night writing for weeks on end) just isn’t doable in my 40s, and it took me a while to accept the fact that I would have to adjust my writing process to fit my needs in the present moment. But the adjustments I eventually made contributed to this being my most personally healthy and rewarding writing project to-date.” –Ijeoma Oluo, author of Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—and How You Can, Too (HarperOne)

“Be open to possible changes to your work amid the publishing process. Hold true to your writerly goals but give new perspectives on your work careful consideration—they may open the door to something grander in the end.” –Theodore Pappas, author of Combing Through the White House: Hair and Its Shocking Impact on the Politics, Private Lives, and Legacies of Presidents (Harper Celebrate)

“To be ever mindful of our power as conscious creators. Worlds are made up of language, words, ideas, thoughts. Through the microcosms we birth in our poems, lyrics, essays, novels, dramas, and screenplays, we can bring forth a just society.” –Deborah G. Plant, author of Of Greed and Glory: In Pursuit of Freedom for All (Amistad)

“Keep the faith. Your ‘last’ submission might be the one that hits the bullseye.” –Evan Rail, author of The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit (Melville House)

“Write the book that will bring about the world in which you want to live. This can be grand, if your book seeks to change our social, cultural, political world, but I also mean it in a smaller sense. Write the book that will reel in the people, the ideas, and the other books that you need in your life. I did end up feeling a bit as if Katharine had mentored me, or at least had drawn women and men into my life who have enormously influenced me. What a gift.” –Amy Reading, author of The World She Edited: Katharine S. White Edits The New Yorker (Mariner Books)

“Persistence! I’d been thinking about this book for nearly a half a decade, my first proposal didn’t sell, and I wrote 14 drafts of the second proposal before my agent felt it was ready to take out. Also: Surround yourself with good people who care about you personally and want to see you succeed.” –Jennifer Romolini, author of Ambition Monster (Atria Books)

“Trust the story to reveal the structure.” –Rosie Schaap, author of The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country (Mariner Books)

“Listen to your inner voice for its creativity, but not its criticism. Creativity is complex, and the inner critic struggles to understand complexity. So, when the critical voice shows up telling you to give up, don’t listen! If it tells you it hates a sentence in chapter 12, maybe go look at it.” –Stacey Simmons, PhD, author of The Queen’s Path: A Revolutionary Guide to Women’s Empowerment and Sovereignty (Hay House)

“That it’s always better to write without thinking than to think without writing. Afterwards, editing and revision exist for a reason.” –Ed Simon, author of Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain (Melville House)

“If you commit yourself to the process and lifestyle of writing, rather than simply the attainment of the end result, you will eventually attain the result.” –Dan Slater, author of The Incorruptibles: A True Story of Kingpins, Crime Busters, and the Birth of the American Underworld (Little, Brown & Co.)

“I think writing about your passion makes the process a dream. I had done the background work before putting pen to paper, so it never felt like a chore. It seems like a daunting process, but you’ll never know if it’s for you unless you try.” –Dr. Richard Smith, author of The World Beneath: The Life and Times of Unknown Sea Creatures and Coral Reefs (Apollo Publishers)

“Find a couple of writers (or other good friends who get it) who make sure you don’t give up when you think you really want to. Send each other your work, your concerns, your pains, your frustrations, and your joys, and just keep each other going.” –Chimene Suleyman, author of The Chain (HarperCollins)

“There are countless forces working against writers, but the writers who manage to overcome them to be successful are not always the writers with the most natural talent. They’re often the ones with the most determination. Never give up.” –Jerald Walker, author of Magically Black and Other Essays (Amistad)

“Write what you love. Write what you need. Let it be a place of joy and soul tending. And don’t forget that we are just one small part of a conversation that has been going on long before we were here and will go on after. Let your words be a part of the conversation.” –Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, author of This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse (Broadleaf Books)

“Write what you can, to the best of your ability, and believe in the worth of your words—especially when others don’t.” –Kao Kalia Yang, author of Where Rivers Part (Atria Books)

____________________________

While there’s no shortage of writing advice, it’s often scattered around—a piece of advice here, words of wisdom there. And in the moments when you most need writing advice, what you find might not resonate with you or speak to the issue you’re dealing with. In A Year of Writing Advice, the editors of Writer’s Digest have gathered thoughts, musings, and yes, advice from 365 authors in dozens of genres to help you on your writing journey.

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(Find more Killer Writers conversations here.)

“Callan, what inspired you to focus on writing essays as a literary form? What’s the attraction?”

“I would consider my real writing to be writing fiction, but other modes allow me to take a break from that—especially if I’m getting stuck in a book project or something—and still feel like I’m being productive and writing and producing and maybe getting something published. I used to write short stories more, and then I could send things out and maybe get a published story here and there. But moving into novels, there’s this long period where you get no validation for what you’re doing, and you’re sort of like writing in a vacuum. In part, writing essays is like, well, I can spend a couple of days, crank this short essay out, get it published, make a little money, and feel like I’m finishing something. I like to finish things. And novels, it seems like you never finish them. That’s one big part of it. I am writing for a particular fishing magazine, for example. It’s good writing and photography and about the fishing lifestyle. They give me a lot of latitude in what I can write about if there’s a little fishing in there. Most of the things I write are about something else, quite honestly, and then some fishing happens. It’s fun. The shorter form, I think, is what attracts me to it. Short fiction, which I used to love to write, no one wants to publish short fiction and pay you for it, at least, in my opinion. So that’s kind of off my radar.”

“How do you find unique and compelling essay writing topics?”

“A lot of it is things from my life. They’re primarily personal essays. Writing a personal essay allows me to work through stuff I’m trying to figure out in my head and put a finer point on my opinions and feelings about an environmental issue or even my work life. It’s something that I can’t do in my fiction as well.”

“When writing personal essays, what key elements make a personal essay stand out?”

“I think having a personal dilemma allows you to access a bigger issue. I’m thinking of one I wrote about guiding. Often, the kind of people I guide come down on, for instance, a vastly different type of political side than I do. It’s this situation where money is exchanging hands, and I’m in a service job, and how you interact with someone you may not interact with on a normal basis, or even like very much, but for this day, you need to show them a good time. I think most people have something like that in their work life.”

“And in the writing life, I’m sure, as well.”

“Yes, exactly. So, finding a personal thing that allows you to branch into a more universal subject would probably be something I start with.”

“Speaking of that, how do your essays balance your voice with that universal appeal? How do you assimilate your voice into that larger audience?”

“All of my writing is a lot of trial and error. Probably more so, veering towards the error side. I don’t have much like, ‘Okay, I will write a personal essay. This is how I’m going to start it.’ Usually, a personal essay comes from something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and then I try to think of different ways to get into it. And again, most of my personal essays are for fishing crowds, so it’s specific. One thing that helps me is that it is an area where I have a certain level of expertise. I’m immersed in that world, and I know a lot of different little angles. Writing a personal essay about other things would be difficult for me. I’m trying to think of another area I could write a personal essay about and feel comfortable—maybe surfing, but that’s about it. Outdoor pursuits are easy for me to launch into.”

“The whole idea of a personal essay is personal. We all know the importance of sucking someone into what you’re writing. Do you have any techniques you use for that first sentence?”

“I do this with my fiction, especially, but I find myself doing it with personal essays. Having just read many things, you’re probably the same way. Most readers are the same if something doesn’t get me quickly in that first paragraph; there are so many conflicts for interest these days. I try to have it start with something very concrete. It’s not thoughts, probably not even a description of something; it’s doing something—whatever that is. Very concrete. Most of my fiction starts with the character performing a physical action and then goes from there. That’s general, but I try to start everything I write by describing a physical activity.”

“Starting at the beginning, what approach do you use for the structure and flow of your essays?”

“I’m not very original. Most of my things have a typical opening situation. Then I digress into my feelings about that sort of thing that may take a lot of different branches and then follow up to sort of the opening construct, whatever that may be. It’s standard.”

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“Do you find that all of this comes out of you organically, or is there research involved?”

“I’m not a big researcher, unfortunately. I respect writers who go heavy on research. I am not inclined to do that, which does limit me a little bit in my subject matter.”

“It fulfills the definition of personal essays because it’s coming from you. If it’s personal, how much detail do you feel inclined to include in each essay?”

“If it’s a personal essay, there does need to be something in there that I’ve written that I’m slightly uncomfortable about sharing. It doesn’t have to be anything crazy, but it’s not something I usually come out with, you know, in a conversation with somebody I just met—that sort of thing. But somehow, I can more easily do that in writing if I’ve had time to think about it.”

“Where do you find the courage for that? Because it does take courage sometimes.”

“It has not gotten any easier. It’s not like I’m making crazy admissions, but I feel like, for it to affect readers, it does need to have a little something in it of yourself. Again, maybe not something you share a lot.”

“Any tricks for readers in making personal essays relatable to a broader audience?”

“It’s the comfort of starting in a subject area where you have a certain degree of comfortability with the subject. For me, that’s fishing. And luckily for me, there’s a lot of fishing writing being done, and there has been for a long time. There’s this sort of market for that, which is nice. I don’t know if it’s the same for many other things like fishing. Again, starting from a point that I’m very comfortable with in terms of the subject matter allows me to branch out into other things that may interest me or affect my life.”

“The uniting thing, then, would be fishing. So, whatever they write for these personal essays, the uniting thing would be their vocation.”

“I think so.”

“Or a particular hobby, or something like that.”

“For me, that would be a great spot to start.”

“If you have this little hesitancy sometimes in a line here or there, when do you say, okay, this essay is ready to go? How do you know when it’s ready for submission?”

“That’s always the hard part. With my stuff, I have a pretty good relationship with the editor of the publication that publishes me the most for the essay stuff, so I’ll write something, and I’ll work on it hard for a couple of days, put it away, come back to it, go over it in another few days. The whole thing will probably take me a week or a week-and-a-half, and then I send it to see if there’s interest. Then, the editor will say, ‘Okay, we can get behind this,’ maybe, ‘Shorten and work on this.’ Usually, it’s cut the word count. I don’t obsess over it too much for the personal essay. It’s a fishing magazine when it comes down to it.”

“For essays, what do you look for in a literary journal before you submit material?”

“Not to be super mercenary and commercial, but a large factor is I do try to make money doing this these days. And so that takes a lot of publications right off the table. Outside of that, maybe a publication that has published writers that I admire in the past. If people I like and writers I admire publish in X-Journal, even if they don’t pay that well, I’m like, ‘Okay, well, people I like are in here.’ Then I’ll give it a shot. Also, if people ask me. I’m a sucker for that. If someone solicits something from me, if I have something, chances are I’ll try.”

“Do you specifically try to tailor your material for different journals’ styles and themes? Or do you write it and then find the placement?”

“I think that’s more what I do. I’ve never done well trying to think about the publication first. It’s more like writing it and seeing if there’s a home for it after that.”

“I assume that you’ve probably been rejected before?”

“Oh, god.”

“Can you share your experience with rejection and how you navigate it? Some people take rejection hard.”

“That’s never good.”

“But you keep writing.”

“Oh, yeah. And you know, the one thing about getting rejected from a publication is it’s sort of impersonal. I mean, they get a lot of submissions in most places, and maybe it’s just not right for them. Those are usually easier. I did grad school, and I did a writing fellowship where it was the writing workshop sort of thing, and that is just brutal because you’re in the room with the people, and it’s not like they’re just saying, ‘No, this isn’t right for our publication.’ They’re like, ‘This story is not right for humanity,’ or ‘This is bad.’ It gets more personal. That’s much harder. Just getting an email from some editor who is like, ‘This isn’t right for us,’ it’s like, all right, fine. I’m going to send it somewhere else. Commercial rejection is much easier than criticism from pointed readers trying to help you improve it.”

“As you’ve gone through your career, what are some common mistakes you’ve made in submitting to journals that you would recommend our audience don’t do?”

“You do need to be familiar with the publication. If you’re writing something just out of line with what they publish, that’s not right.”

“Target it well.”

“And also, being aware. Maybe you have one that you like, and no one wants it, then maybe you need to go back to the drawing board on that one or start something new.”

“Do you submit cover letters with those? And if so, what makes a good one?”

“I have to say, I’ve not been a big cover letter guy. Maybe the kind of writing I do is not so much that I’m just sending things out unless I know the editor or have an email relationship with them. I should speak to that question. If you can get some personal relationship with the person who’s maybe going to buy the story, it’s more like, ‘Hey, Bob, I have this essay I think might work for your publication. I’m going to send it to you. If you have time, give it a read.’ Something straightforward and informal. I’m sure a cover letter might be more important in some people’s writing lives.”

“You were talking about the editor, Bob? What advice do you have for building a relationship with Bob and other editors?”

“I have noticed that sometimes they need some material for whatever reason. Maybe due to publication day, they have room for something they don’t have. If they reach out, I try to send them something. That is one thing. If people reach out and say, ‘Hey, we’re looking for something,’ I feel like your foot is in the door, and if you don’t take advantage of that, it’s a missed opportunity for sure. Even if you don’t think everything you have is perfectly right or all the way done, try to send them something. That’s an excellent first step.”

“You got them on the line and reel them in. Returning to your essays, what advice would you give aspiring essayists about building a sustainable career or a literary presence in writing essays?”

“Oh, man! Have a different job, maybe. Don’t quit your day job. Try to be generating. That’s always my thing. I’ve had great writing teachers in the past. When I was in grad school, and many people were concerned about getting publications and things like that, I had a great writing teacher who said, ‘If you write and are generating, and it’s good, the publications will probably come.’ Just focus on the work first and be generating, and then, things just seem to flow from that. Maybe that’s sort of simplistic or naive, but that is how I’ve tried to do it, and it’s, to some degree, worked out. Focus more on the writing and less on the publishing.”

“They made a whole movie about that sort of thing: Field of Dreams.”

“Exactly. It’s like a little bit of putting the cart before the horse. If you’re worried too much about publishing things and don’t have much in the bag that you’ve written.”

___________________

Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/beartooth

The post A Conversation With Callan Wink on Writing and Selling Personal Essays (Killer Writers) appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(My Writer Success Story Began With Getting Over Myself.)

Indeed, Shapiro practices what she preaches to her students. She writes vulnerable, raw, and relatable essays and memoirs about her life experiences ranging from love to addiction, but she is also abundantly clear about what such successful work requires of writers. One of the main pieces of advice she offers in her popular writing guide and online classes deals with family: “Remember, the first piece you write that your family hates means you’ve found your voice,” she says. “If you don’t want to offend anyone, try writing a cookbook.”

I am no stranger to writing essays that—I assume—my family hates. Although, I suspect that I care less than the average writer about this specific risk. I am a big believer in what is perhaps Anne Lamott’s most famous (and controversial) commentary about writing. In her book Bird By Bird, which functions as part memoir, part guide for writers, she asserts the following: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

I have taken both Shapiro’s and Lamott’s guidance to heart tenfold, particularly when I decided to write about the recent death of an abusive family member.

Tell Your Stories

At 43 years old, I have spent most of my life disconnected from extended family. As a child, I couldn’t make sense of the constant conflict that ultimately led to the adults estranging from each other for years on end. My experiences, and the pure vitriol I witnessed from such a young age, were so extreme that I opted out of having children of my own. To my mind, remaining childfree was the only surefire way to break the cycle of intergenerational dysfunction that had plagued my upbringing.

Recently, when a few relatives found me on social media and extended an invitation to connect, a small part of me wondered if I should interpret their contact as an olive branch of sorts. Had they regretted their three-decades-long absence from my life? Were they curious about the woman I became? Did they miss me? What were their memories of us?

My curiosity got the better of me and I decided to grant their requests for access but with boundaries firmly in place: We’d engage on social media, but nowhere else. I had no reason to believe that these people were psychologically safe for me to interact with on a deep level. I would need to assess the situation for myself, and given my experiences in therapy and knowledge of how intergenerational trauma works, I knew which patterns to look for. The moment their presence reminded me of those old childhood wounds, I’d have to walk away.

The outcome was all too predictable, and it didn’t take long to be faced with that decision.

Finding Your Voice

Within months of my tepid reconnection with these family members, my maternal grandmother passed away. We were all, for better or for worse, connected through this woman. We all carry significant trauma as a direct result of her brand of mothering. Not one family member has gotten out unscathed; my own therapy bills are proof of her legacy.

Discussions about abusive and toxic family systems are finally gaining traction in the public imagination. It benefits no one to keep these realities in the shadows, and I feel called to contribute to the discourse where I can. Several weeks after her death, my essay, “This Woman’s Controversial Obituary For Her Mom Caused Outrage — But We Need More Like It,” was published in the Huffington Post. It was my first piece with the outlet, and was a result of one of my “humiliation” essays, Susan Shapiro’s hallmark assignment with which she encourages her students to reveal their most embarrassing secret.

As it happens, my family legacy consists of adults turning on each other before eating their young—perhaps my most humiliating secret to date.

The essay highlights my skepticism about the obituary genre as a whole. I situate my commentary in the context of the death of my grandmother, a woman for whom nothing positive could possibly be written or spoken. I critique the long-held and outdated belief that the deceased deserve nothing but admiration, praise, and idolatry. I push back against the idea that to highlight their abuses is to speak ill of the dead. When the dead can no longer be held accountable for their life-altering destruction, it seems ghoulish to give them a vote in how they are remembered, whether privately or publicly.

Too many survivors of abuse and dysfunction are often forced to bear witness to how their deceased family members are deified by others simply for having died, and with blatant disregard for how these people lived. Their victims are not only expected to remain silent, but to actively partake in this glorification—often at significant cost to one’s mental health.

The cost of this silence is too high, and writers are uniquely positioned to enter the conversation in ways that might help an extraordinary amount of people.

Writing as a Public Service

Through my essay, I was reminded of how some people are ill-prepared for what it means to have a writer in the family.

After my piece was published, several of my distant relatives made their feelings loud and clear. These are the same people who dropped out of my life decades ago. One called me names and resorted to intimidation tactics while the other reprimanded me as though I was a child, and not a professional writer with the right to her stories. Their darkness and dysfunction—those old patterns of abuse that I remembered all too well from childhood—were on full public display. I suppose their behavior accomplished the opposite of what they had in mind: Their toxic responses only validated the need for pieces like mine.

Remarkably, the feedback I received from strangers also validated the need to bring abuse out of the closet in our essays and stories. When I published this essay, I expected significant pushback from social media’s nauseating “family is everything” brigade, but received quite the opposite from most readers.

Since my piece went live, I’ve heard from survivors and mental health professionals alike who also recognize the need for raw stories about the realities of toxic family systems. But perhaps the most riveting note I received came from a hospice bereavement counselor whose life’s work centers on facilitating care for survivors of abusive family members. In her email to me, she’d written the following about her clients:

I am in such awe of their honesty and willingness to share about the person who died, no holds barred. You may be interested in reading the book “Liberating Losses, When Death Brings Relief.” It is a wonderful resource, and reminds us that we do not grieve everyone.

As for my family, I guess they hated my essay. Which means I found my voice. But I’ll take it one step further: I not only found my voice, I found my truth. 

The post I Let Extended Family Back Into My Life. They Were Ill-Prepared for My Career as a Writer. appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Frontlist

First Love: Essays on Friendship by Lilly Dancyger

(The Dial Press, Essays, May 2024)

Order a copy of First Love by Lilly Dancyger:

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Synopsis: In this collection of 15 essays, Lilly Dancyger reflects on and interrogates all manner of female friendships, from those first friendships of early childhood to those of adulthood; from hyper-intense friendships that only last for a certain period of life to ones that span decades and feel more like chosen family. While Dancyger’s friendships are at the center of these personal essays, she also connects them to broader topics like how female friendships are portrayed more widely in books (Sylvia Plath, Anaïs Nin), media, social media (“sad girls” on Tumblr), and recent history.

Throughout the collection, Dancyger’s cousin and first friend, Sabina, serves as the touchpoint, opening with an essay that details the start of their friendship to Sabina’s murder at the age of 20. As the subsequent essays jump to key moments in Dancyger’s teenage years and early adulthood, each one rooted in a friendship representative of that moment and essay topic, Dancyger never leaves Sabina or the impacts of her death far behind. The final essay, “On Murder Memoirs,” brings things full circle, with Dancyger considering murder memoirs and why she chose to focus on friendship instead.

What I loved about it: The first thing I noticed about this collection of essays is the level of detail Dancyger brings to them—details specific to each friend and details specific to the time period discussed. The cultural touchstones of the 1990s and 2000s Dancyger references immediately sparked memories of my closest friendships at the time. Because of this, even when Dancyger got specific about details of her friendships, I, as the reader, still felt connected to the points she was demonstrating.

It was also impressive that Dancyger was able to remember so many of these details from so long ago. You can read more about how she did this in her article, “Turning Real People Into Characters Is an Act of Translation,” from the March/April 2024 issue of Writer’s Digest.

Backlist

On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel

(Knopf, Literary/crime fiction, February 2023)

Order a copy of On the Savage Side by Tiffany McDaniel:

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Synopsis: Set in Chillicothe, Ohio, and inspired by the unsolved murders of six Chillicothe women, On the Savage Side is the story of Arcade and Daffodil, twins who were born just one minute apart. From those first moments, the girls aren’t just sisters, but best friends and protectors of each other—no small feat during a childhood in which their mother relapses back into drug addiction and brings home unsafe men for drug money.

Years later, as Arcade wrestles with similar demons and tries to come to terms with her memories of that childhood, women in the town—including some of Arcade’s closest friends— start disappearing. Sometimes their bodies are found; other times, it’s as if they’ve vanished. Either way, when Arc realizes few people care about figuring out what’s happened to these women who’ve been cast aside by society at large, her role as protector extends from her sister to the other women around her, putting her in increasingly dangerous situations.

What I loved about it: When I was reading Lilly Dancyger’s essays about friendship, it was this novel that instantly came to mind as a companion read because friendship and sisterhood are at the heart of the story. Arcade and Daffodil are sisters, sure, but they’re also each other’s first and best friend. Most often, they’re the only people they can rely on. As the years progress, readers also see Arc develop friendships with other women, ones that fill the holes left by family and a society that have all but given up on them. These fictional girls and women are as lovingly and intricately drawn as the real girls and women of Dancyger’s essays.

Separately from that, this book has graphics and design elements that aren’t often found in novels but are truly compelling. For example, when a character the girls call “the spider” returns to the narrative, a drawing of a spider appears on the page. There are other illustrated elements, but I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just add: As you read, don’t flip ahead or you’ll risk spoilers. 

The post Frontlist/Backlist: On Friendship appeared first on Writer's Digest.