How to Write About Hard Things (Part 2)
Questions to Ask Yourself to Go Deeper in Your Writing
Ready to get personal in your personal essay? Finishing a first draft is a feat within itself. Sometimes, when you’re writing fast and free, it’s all you can do to get your story on the page.
Often, that means when a certain scene or line of thinking requires more of you than you’re prepared to give in the moment, you write some a fluff. A bit of a place holder until you’re ready to delve back in. This isn’t necessarily done consciously, so it’s not always apparent at the end where your nonfiction is lacking.
As you review your work, you can ask yourself a few questions to make sure you’re really getting at the heart of what you’re trying to say. An editor can also be helpful in this process by giving you a reader POV to revise toward.
Are You Being Honest or Are You Confessing?
“Honesty is not the same as confession.” In My Misspent Youth, Meghan Daum explains, “Honesty means offering something to the reader — a piece of yourself or a set of suggestions. Honesty means making the reader feel less alone. Honesty is inherently generous. Confession is inherently needy and intrusive.”
In the click-crazy world of online publishing, it can be tempting to write only the most salacious of stories about yourself. It can feel like that’s all an editor wants from you. But that kind of writing can leave you empty and feeling spent, and frankly, does little to flex your craft muscle as a writer. You can write just as compelling essays built off simpler, more ordinary life events.
The key, then, is to write about them honestly and write about them beautifully. Your voice and mastery of craft will keep the reader engaged, but your honesty is what will stay with your reader long after they finish reading. Because through that honesty, you have made them feel seen.
“Honesty means offering something to the reader — a piece of yourself or a set of suggestions. Honesty means making the reader feel less alone.” — Meghan Daum
If you’re writing about something challenging, like let’s say death, do you just detonate a death bomb on the reader and leave them to grapple with the emotions on their own? Yeah, don’t do that. Guide your reader through the series of emotions you felt and how those emotions shaped your actions. Otherwise, your reader might feel like you’re shoving them through a Fun House of Feelings where everything is distorted and lurid.
What Was Your Motivation for Writing This Piece?
Revenge is not the right motivation. If you’re writing from a place of pain you haven’t processed, it can weaken your essay in a few different ways:
- You’ll create a villain type character out of who hurt you and those characters tend to come across as flat and uninteresting.
- You’ll get lost in your emotions. This will take your piece from an essay to a rant, and no one really wants to read you rant about your hurt feelings.
- It doesn’t illuminate anything for the reader when you write an essay that goes, “This person hurt me. They suck. The end.” There’s no real story there. The story is in what happens AFTER the worst thing that could happen actually happened to you.
If you realize you weren’t in the best place emotionally when you wrote a piece, that’s okay. Just open a bottom drawer and throw the piece in. In a few weeks or months, or however long it takes you to get right with your feelings, pull the drawer open and have another go at your essay.
Is This True?
When you’re the writer, you wield the power. This means, you want to try to stay true the spirit of the experience. This means, for example, you might not remember exactly what your second grade bully said before they put bubblegum in your hair, but you can totally write dialogue that believably could have happened.
Now, there are some purists, that are against this, but most contemporary creative nonfiction writers write by the rule that as long as it’s true to the spirit of what was said or what happened, you’re good.
Same with, if you remember something one way, but you start rooting around in your history or talking to friends and family and realize you totally misunderstood what happened. It’s not right to relay the event with a false filter over it. I just submitted a draft of an essay to an editor. She had some questions about who said what when I wrote something along the lines of “They say xyz…blah… blah… blah.” When I did a Google search to find the pieces that spouted the negative nonsense I was in opposition of, I discovered that no one is really saying those things anymore. It’s totally passé. Yet, in my head I was still pushing back against these ideas.
My perspective completely shifted. So, to keep my essay true, I now need to rewrite it from this new frame of mind because that’s what’s most honest. It can be hard to let go of the things we believe, but clinging to them doesn’t help us grow and doesn’t challenge our readers to grow either. It’s really rewarding when your own writing reveals something about yourself to you. It means more work in the writing process, but ultimately, it’s one of the main reasons we write.
Am I Being Vulnerable?
Being vulnerable is never easy. You can usually tell when you’ve been vulnerable in a piece of writing because those butterflies in your stomach get to fluttering at the thought of other people reading it. Each piece you publish should scare you at least a little bit.
Because this totally magical thing happens. One, the awful thing you thought was going to happen, generally doesn’t and, usually, what does happen is you get a lot of people reaching out to you and telling you they’ve had those awful thoughts too or said those horrible things or did that terrible act they’ve always been ashamed to admit. You become lighter and the world gets a little bit smaller — in a good way.
But, I’m also very much in support of taking your time with how you reveal through your writing. You should do it at your own pace. There’s difference between feeling like what you’re publishing is risky and feeling like what you’re publishing makes you want hide under your bed FOREVER. Only you can determine what your tolerance for vulnerability is.
Sharing your work with friends or an impartial third-party like a professional editor, can help you gauge how ready you are to publish a piece.
