What Makes for a Great Personal Essay
By: Shaq Cheris
Tags: Writing, Writing Tips, Personal Essay, Médium, Roundtable

What Makes for a Great Personal Essay

There once was a time where journalists were proclaiming that the personal essay was dead. In 2017, Jia Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker that, “The Internet made the personal essay worse, as it does for most things.” Now, in 2021, that couldn’t be further than the truth. The first-person narrative stands tall as an essential type of journalism, allowing for writers everywhere to make a living sharing their own experiences and telling their truths. Furthermore, the personal essay’s longevity will continue to stand the test of time because of one simple fact: Anyone can write one. You see, everyone will always have a story to tell, and every story will always have an audience that can relate to it.

For the writer, the value of personal essay writing is in using your personal experience to tell a wider story either that impacts a community or the world or that reflects what’s going on in politics through your frustration. People will see themselves in your writing.

With that being said, not all personal essays are made equal. A lot of them either err on the side of being too safe and uninteresting or lean too far left and end up a chaotic whirlwind of oversharing. Knowing how to strike the balance is the key to writing a captivating personal essay.

A few weeks ago, we invited some of our in-house staff to discuss the art of the personal essay. First up in the conversation, we asked: What makes for a great first-person essay? What are some of the essential elements, some of the important dos and don’ts, and how do you approach your own personal essays?

This series of recorded interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Jolie A. Doggett, Senior Platform Editor

The number one rule I can say is honesty. Be as honest as possible, how you’re feeling, and edit yourself down after that. Really, just leave it all on the page in that first draft. If you’re trying too hard to sound like someone else or sound like how you should, how you think you want to sound, like you’re trying to sound too newsy, it’s just not going to come across well. Also, honesty in that your personal experience should be true. It shouldn’t be made up.

I think I approach personal essays in the way that I think about them: What is the point I’m trying to make? What is the point of me telling the story? Then, I start with my personal story. Then, I lead to whatever the bigger point is, which I think is the value of personal essay writing, in that you can use your personal experience to tell a wider story that impacts either your community or the world, or that reflects what’s going on in politics that reflects your frustration, because you’re speaking about the impact on you. Then, people can see themselves in your writing.

Amanda Sakuma, Editor

Think of your story as a screenplay. I always think that it’s helpful to not only have your personal narrative through the story, but also the narrator’s voice. You’re saying everything’s fine, and then it’s the narrator’s voice: “Everything was not fine.” It’s really helpful to bring that context because that’s what brings the depth.

If you think about it as a screenplay, you’re building the background for your character. You’re building that context together so that people understand that when you enter the room, it’s not just the act of you entering the room. It’s also everything that comes with your body entering the room, all of that context, all of that background. The act of weaving that through your narrative is super tricky. Sometimes, it almost helps to write two separate versions of that story, like the story that you’re doing for you, like the personally-driven narrative essay, and then also the story that’s written by someone who’s following behind you and watching it from afar, because I think the outside view gives it that whole breadth and depth that makes it a lasting impact.

Jon Gluck, Editorial Director

Yeah, just to build on Jolie’s point about honesty, I often think to myself that the best personal essays feel like they’re investigative journalism directed at the person’s own self. They just take an incredibly honest, if not sometimes brutally honest, look at themselves and what it is that they want to say. I think the other side of that coin is the worst, though, when it feels like self-aggrandizement; when someone’s trying to present a prettied-up version of themselves, or they’re sympathy-seeking on some level. I think that that degree, more than that degree, that commitment to total honesty is definitely one of the central engines of a great personal essay.

This is my second-biggest point, or maybe right up there with honesty: interestingness. The same criteria for that goes into a personal essay as it does for any story: drama, conflict, extreme circumstances, interesting characters, background context of the sort Amanda was just talking about.

Then, sometimes people say to me: “Well, what if nothing’s happened to me that’s that interesting?” First of all, I think probably every single one of us has had plenty of things happen to us that are that interesting. It’s just a matter of reflecting enough to identify them. But there’s a whole other genre of the personal essay, too, that I personally love: where you can manufacture a quest or some sort of organizing principle for the story. Whether you’re going to become a poker champion or go on a Zen retreat for a year, or learn how to cook in France, and try and rediscover yourself, you do an Eat, Pray, Love kind of thing.

It doesn’t always have to be something that’s happened, past tense. It can be something that you set up to happen as a deliberate construct. I think both of those can work super well.

Jolie A. Doggett, Senior Platform Editor

Can I add something to Jon’s point of interestingness? I just want to say that if it’s interesting to you, it’ll be interesting to somebody else. If it is frustrating to you, someone else is likely frustrated about it. If it makes you passionate, someone else is really passionate about it. I want to add a caveat to interestingness, tying that into honesty: Don’t try to write about something that you don’t actually care about. Write about the things that you care about, and your audience will find you, for sure.

Voice really helps show that you’re passionate about something and that you care about something, and it’s actually personal. I feel like sometimes I’ll read a personal essay that sounds like it was assigned, and it was polished to sound like the outlet that’s publishing it.. I just think that’s the worst thing you could do to a personal essay because it just takes the person out of it. It sounds like somebody from the outside could have written it just by observing. Jada?

Jada Gomez, Senior Platform Editor

What I always find compelling, and what I’ve encouraged writers to do, is to look at those experiences that not many people have. If it’s something that you’ve gone through, and you’ve felt alone in that experience, you can write it with the intention of making sure other people going through that experience don’t feel alone as well. I think for me, when I was writing a lot of personal essays, I would just get frustrated because I couldn’t see my experience in anything. Either it was very stereotypical, or I was written out of the Long Island experience that I actually had, as a Brown person, which is a shock to a lot of people.

I made sure to include any story or any experience where I felt alone in, I would want to bring that to the forefront. Those are the ones that usually resonate with people. At Bustle, we did a personal essay series on a woman who had tested for the BRCA gene. We went through her whole experience, pre-and post-surgery.

That’s something that you hear people getting tested for all the time, but you don’t know what that experience is actually like for a 28-year-old. That was something that so many people resonated with. It was a really healing experience for the writer. I think really looking for those experiences that are not represented, and if you’ve ever felt alone in an experience, I feel like that’s the experience to write about, because it really resonates with people.