week ten: the personal essay

No lectures or tutorials this week, so I thought I'd revise what we learned last week on the personal essay. During the tute, Cam handed out Joseph Epstein's introduction to The Norton Book of Personal Essays for us to read, highlight, and extract ideas or tips about personal essays. These are just a few great tips that I feel really stood out to me:

1. An "unreliable narrator" is a euphemism for "bad writer". 
"The personal essay has this single quality of difference from diction: it is bounded-some might say grounded-by reality. There are no unreliable narrators in personal essays; in a personal essay an unreliable narrator is just another name for a bad writer."

2. You don't have to be middle-aged to write a personal essay. Wisdom helps, but age is but a number, and everyone, young and old, will have an experience they are able to reflect on. 
"The personal essay calls for a certain experience of life and the disposition to reflect upon that experience."

3. Sometimes, it's okay to let your pen loose and allow the story to get a life of its own. It may even bring you to great places. (Applies to fiction, too.)
"When I begin a story I generally do not have anything like a clear notion of its direction... I have always been impressed by a remark of Robert Frost's to the effect that whenever he knew the ending of a poem in advance of writing it, the poem turned out to be a damn poor one."

4. Decide which genre is most appropriate for your subject matter. 
"All this may be a roundabout way of saying that stories are about what happens to characters, while essays are about what happens to one character: the essayist him- or herself.

5. Personal experience in personal essays (that may lack in objectivity, but written with genuine honesty), has a universal resonance.
"This direct presentation of the self, when it comes off, gives the personal essay both its charm and its intimacy... Perhaps it is this intimacy that makes the personal essay and almost irresistible form."

6. Modesty is the best policy.
"The personal essayist is most profound, at least for me, when his intentions are most modest."

7. Confess, but don't obsess. 
"An element of confession resides in the personal essay, but, in my view, it ought not to dominate."

And there you have it: yet another enjoyable lesson courtesy of Cam and Stuart. I am truly going to miss them and this course when it's over. Only two more weeks left. Sigh.

Julia