Shame and Showmanship: 5 Steps to Intimate and Authentic Personal Essays

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There is no writing more intimate or vulnerable than the personal essay: poems can be coded in metaphor and imagery, and stories are made of characters who act like we sometimes wish we could, but essays, essays dig deep into the parts of ourselves that ache and obsess, that even after years or decades are still tender to the touch. 

“Essay writing is about transcribing the often convoluted process of thought, leaving your own brand of breadcrumbs in the forest so that those who want to can find their way to your door,” writes Lauren Slater in the Best American Essays 2006. “The essayist often brings to the writing table an odd mix of shame and showmanship and it may well be that the tension thererin is what propels the work.” 

And it’s true, the essayist must make the ugly parts of themselves—of the world—sing, to show how beautifully haunting a moment is when we spill the darkest ink inside us. 

In Abandon Me by Melissa Febos, she writes, “We all craft a story we can live with. The one that makes ourselves easier to live with. This is not the one worth writing. To write your story, you must face a truer version of it. You must look at the parts that hurt, that do not flatter or comfort you. That do not spare you the trouble of knowing what made you, and what into.” 

In other words, as Steve Almond says, “Slow down where it hurts.” A personal essay is a chance to look slowly, nakedly—and yes, brutally—at the self, to ask yourself not only what can I learn from this story, but what deeper truth from my own life, the world, human nature, is bubbling underneath.

Vivian Gornick says that in the personal essay, readers are looking for, “a wholeness of being in a narrator that the reader experiences as reliable. One we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before.”

Below are five steps to writing personal essays that will bring your readers to their knees. For a deeper dive, please join us this Sunday for How To Write a Personal Essay. 

1. Situation. Every essay needs an event or events that increase in complexity and conflict. Translation: something needs to happen, whether it is a relationship or a trip to the grocery store. We need a container for our thoughts to echo against. In other words, we need actions, people, and events (scenes plus dialogue) to be able to express and examine ideas.