I’d always heard about hitting “rock bottom.” A bender, a catastrophic loss, a near-death experience. None of these things happened to me. What happened, instead, was a writing problem.

I did notice the references to alcohol stacking up. Excavating the loving yet fraught dynamic I shared with my mother in the form of a memoir in essays, I saw the repetitive allusions to a wine glass here, a favorite bar there, were beginning to compound upon themselves. That the significance was expanding beyond the realm of subtext into a noisy, distracting, uninterrogated theme across the essays in the manuscript wasn’t immediately clear to me when I started the project during pandemic lockdown. It should have been, but it wasn’t (maybe because, like many of us, I was doing even more drinking trapped indoors—but I suspect the real culprit was denial). But I also had this sense, at least subconsciously, that I could still control the narrative. That I could shift attention toward my mother and away from myself in revisions. That, in the end, I was still “handling it.”

This might be one of my most effective personal examples of the well-worn adage to “write first, edit later,” or the even more well-worn, well-lubricated version: “Write drunk, edit sober.” In both cases, the truth, indeed, will out.

I was several essays shy of a finished manuscript draft when, in the early spring of 2022, I traveled from North Idaho to Nebraska for a two-week artist’s residency. Five years earlier, I’d completed a draft of what would go on to become my first book at this same residency and had subsequently granted the place—at least in my imagination—a special power for assisting in the completion of projects as a result. In anticipation of this second trip, I had envisioned spending my writing time alcohol-free. I’d already taken a month off from drinking at the start of the year and found it unpleasant but manageable, enjoying the sensation of control, the efficient de-bloating effect, and the improved sleep quality that came with an extended break from daily booze. The fact that I’d rushed to the grocery store for a bottle of wine the minute my 30-day detox was over hadn’t yet settled into my conscious awareness as a major red flag.

However, it only took about 2.3 seconds after stepping from the airport shuttle onto the heat-cracked streets of Nebraska City for my mind to flood with recollections of my first visit to this town back in 2017—an experience that had validated my artistic aspirations, permitted me to luxuriate in my own sense of creative bohemia, and involved pretty much perpetual daily drinking after 3 or 4 p.m.

Part of the magic of this residency was its isolation from anything distracting outside one’s office or studio, except for a lovely park about a mile away and a couple of grungy dive bars scattered along the main street…and, of course, the liquor store several blocks south along the state highway. It was, in other words, an ideal place to read, write, walk, and drink. That’s exactly how I’d filled my time during my first visit. And almost immediately upon my return, I realized (that is, decided) that a “dry” residency risked ruining the power of the place, of its self-ascribed “finish the book” aura.

I’m not a superstitious person. I invented this necessity out of fear that without the alcohol, I wouldn’t be able, or perhaps even want, to finish writing my book.

So, I walked to the liquor store. I bought a six pack of beer for the fridge and a bottle of Bulleit rye, a bottle I tucked behind the desk in my office. If I knew that the hiding of the rye was a sign of something problematic, I also knew—or thought I knew—I needed it. That the rye (or bourbon, or gin), after years of associating a drink close at hand with the excitement and difficulty, the trying and seeking and ultimate satisfaction of figuring out my ideas on the page, had come to feel necessary to my creative process.

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When I first got word that my debut book, Thank You, John, had been accepted for publication, I felt a strange mix of excitement and panic. Excitement because, well, it was actually getting published. Panic because after seven years of writing and editing the same document, all in the hopes of getting a publisher—a feat that had consumed my life for all those years!—I couldn’t help but ask myself, Wait, did I just finish the one meaningful story I’ll ever have?

It felt dramatic, but also true. Thank You, John, my memoir of the years I spent sugar babying to get out of poverty and student loan debt, held every secret I’d ever carried, every memory I thought mattered, everything I believed made me interesting to readers. I told myself I had nothing of importance left to say. Nothing else worth sharing. There was nothing else I could write that would justify taking up space on the page again. The curtain had closed!

Lucky for me, life intervened with new material.

One afternoon, my brother-in-law, Luis, called me in a panic. A Craigslist car sale had gone sideways. Long story short: a car Luis sold to a stranger promptly broke down. The man wanted a return and refund, but Luis had already spent the money he’d been paid in order to pay off debts elsewhere. Luis called me because needed the money ASAP. “Or else,” the Craigslist man allegedly said, “I’m going to kick your ass.”

Ah, money. Always mine and my family’s Achilles heel.

At the time, I was working three jobs, including adjuncting at a university where most of my students were wealthy, white, and blissfully apolitical. I was grading essays about Lake Tahoe vacations and study-abroad trips while trying to figure out how to scrounge together $3,000 to bail out my brother-in-law.

Meanwhile, my nephew, who was 15, started talking about going to college, specifically mentioning the school where I taught. I couldn’t quite picture him there. A Mexican-American kid who loves Frank Sinatra and the Raiders? The campus was, for lack of a better word, homogenous. Plus, I knew tuition cost nearly $30,000 a year!! I couldn’t help but think of all the debt he’d have to take on. I kept circling the same question in my head: Was college worth it if you have to go into serious debt for it? My entire memoir was about sleeping with a john to climb out of debt, a compromised and yet privileged job.

With all of this going on in my life, without even meaning to, I started writing again. Little scraps at first. Notes typed into my phone. Thoughts jotted down during Zoom meetings. I didn’t know the shape yet. Was this about higher education? Generational mobility? The Craigslist disaster? My nephew? All of it?

I wrote badly and without a clear direction for months. But eventually (after several false starts and eight long months), I found the real story. My essay “Plans for Future Disasters” was published in The Offing, and it felt wholly new. I’d written about my nephew’s father, a man who didn’t appear in my memoir, and his experiences being an immigrant in the U.S., generational dreams, and the familiar tension around money that haunted us all.

But when that essay came out, the panic returned just as forcefully: Okay. Now what? Now I really have nothing to say.

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You know how some people are really good at giving gifts? How they somehow nail it every time? This unique skill combines an attention to detail with the ability to come outside of oneself. Giving a good gift also requires some intuition and confidence, i.e. I know what this recipient will enjoy. It also might just take…practice.

The memoir genre has often been called “solipsistic” or “self-centered” or (most-annoyingly) “navel-gazing,” but what I’ve learned as the reader and writer of memoir is that a personal narrative can actually be the ultimate gift. I don’t mean this literally as a holiday gift (but sure, that too). Here, the memoirist says, I present to you this story I have created with my whole heart in the hopes that my experiences will speak to your heart, too.

But this is not a straightforward process: When writing memoir and personal essays, the self-doubt can become overwhelming. We repeatedly wonder why we’re putting ourselves through the vulnerable and often painful excavation of the past, when old traumas and wounds threaten any stability we’ve managed to achieve. At this common inflection point, fellow memoirists and essayists gather ’round in living rooms, in online threads, in a multitude of craft books to reiterate exactly what we’ve all experienced as readers but need constant reminding as writers: that sharing lived experiences can create powerful connection and make the world a smaller place. Isn’t it worth it, we ask each other, if our specific story can make even one reader feel less alone in their pain? With this simple guiding question, most of us can re-open our laptops or our notebooks to begin once again or doggedly pick up where we left off.

All of this said, it isn’t necessary or even wise to think too much about the reading public when first drafting a memoir or essay. Doing so can increase the stakes and create too much pressure. It can also render the process less organic and overly focused on the end product. This is what self-help or business books are for. The revision stage can be the more effective time to consider your work from the outside.

When I was drafting my memoir, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice, I was carrying so much publishing industry baggage and heartbreak that I had to pretend what I was typing so feverishly every night was not a book, no no no, but a letter to my son. In those early days, it was a gift to him, so that he could understand the complicated circumstances surrounding his birth and get to know my mother, who passed away on his first birthday, the day I was hosting a zebra-themed party for him. It was also a way to help him get to know me more and why I made the decisions I made during that challenging time. I filled my pages with as much sensory and psychological detail as possible, to share these memories and feelings fully.

Predictably, by the time I completed the first draft, my lifelong publishing dreams kicked in again. After all those hours of pouring my heart onto the screen one sentence at a time, I knew I wanted my words to be in the world.

I therefore needed to reconsider my manuscript from a general reader’s perspective, to see my intimate and specific story from the outside. I wanted to connect my narrative to more universal themes, and to think about what readers might learn from my mistakes and triumphs.

The first decision I made was to dial back the “directed you,” or epistolary aspect, instead directing only discreet parts (the zebra party sections starting each chapter) to my son. This allowed me to maintain some of that original intimacy, but also to invite readers in with a standard first-person narration.

In the course of the next few years and at least 14 drafts, I proceeded to take myself through a series of exercises cobbled together from several online courses, craft essays, craft books, and friendly advice. Each of the following recommendations helped me to see my story from varying angles and imagine how it might be received. I offer these methods for you to consider as well:

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In nearly every class I teach—whether it’s at NYU, Writer’s Digest, or a private workshop—someone asks me: “How honest is too honest?” That question is usually followed by another one: “But what if my family reads it?” or “Do I have to include everything?”

These are the questions writers should be asking. But the answer is complex: Contrary to popular belief, compelling personal writing isn’t about spilling your guts—it’s about shaping your truth and your story. The strongest essays live in the space between transparency and discretion. In other words, as I said in my award-winning book Writing That Gets Noticed, to reveal but also conceal isn’t cowardice. It’s craft.

In my TEDx Talk, “How to Get Noticed in Your Writing and Beyond,” I emphasize that it isn’t about writing more—it’s about writing what matters.

What does that imply? It means that we need to stop writing for validation (I felt hurt, so I’m justified), and start writing for meaning, i.e. this is why I felt this way, and this is how I reacted and why I reacted (or didn’t).

As a longtime editor, coach and podcaster I’ve seen firsthand what happens when writers confuse confession with storytelling. They may get attention—but not the kind that elevates their careers or their lives.

Is Everything Really Content?

The author and screenwriter Nora Ephron famously said, “Everything is copy.” But is it really? We are all at a moment in time where trauma is content, where TikTok confessions and Substack diary entries reward immediacy over reflection. But here’s the truth: publishing isn’t therapy. A story isn’t powerful because it’s painful, it’s powerful because it’s been shaped…and offers insight.

When you overshare keep in mind: it isn’t the same as storytelling. Oversharing means showing your rage on the page about someone without giving context on your own situation, or revealing you have a deformity or disability without explaining why it’s important for you to reveal it. In my case, I’ve written and spoken about my hearing loss in my TEDx Talk, and how it has impacted my parenting. I didn’t do it to gain sympathy—it was connected to the story. I said in my talk: “The more I clearly write and talk about what scares, me, the less power it has to shame me.” When my former student revealed her childhood selective mutism, in an essay about Irish dancing and embracing being noticed, it was a necessary part of her storytelling.

I’ve course corrected students who wanted to write about breaking the law during the pandemic, because nobody needed that kind of scrutiny. One that sticks out in my mind is a writer who was in the middle of a separation and child custody hearing and wanted to write about wanting to wreak vengeance on their unruly children. I told her not to write about it because doing it risked permanently damaging those still-forming relationships—and could have repercussions in court.

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In the 1970s and 1980s, the expectation was that news broadcasters speak in a Mid-Atlantic, or what is sometimes now referred to as a General American, accent. Think: World News Tonight’s Peter Jennings. TV anchors stripped their personality and regional tells from their speaking voices. Sweet Southern darlings lost their drawls. Valley Girls chilled on their vocal fry. And the Boston bred got familiar with enunciating each and every “r.” The supposed reasoning behind the industry standard was that if you sounded like you were from nowhere, you could hypothetically be from anywhere and thus report the news to audiences everywhere. There was also the belief that this “neutral” accent communicated to viewers that you held “upper-class education and erudition.” Sound classist? Many standards of professionalism are.

Sometimes beginner writers seek to abandon—rather than develop—their natural writing voice in pursuit of an elevated style they believe will make them sound smarter and imbue their words with a sense of authority. They come by this desire honestly. So much of what we learn about writing during our early education is the art of imitation, cutting our teeth on the dry, boring prose that populated many of our textbooks and assigned readings. And as we grew older, professional settings often required us to proffer up a blander version of ourselves to progress in the workplace.

Early in my writing career, I often received the criticism that I “write how you speak.” The feedback was dismissive, so I dismissed it in return. I just couldn’t see the fault in who I was coming across loud and clear on the page. I think my commitment to sounding like myself helped me foster a strong, distinct writing voice. An essential skill as a writer.

Just as the painter who wishes to be celebrated for their craft must find their signature stroke, a writer must hone their unique writing voice. You know a Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Faith Ringgold, an Amy Sherald before your eyes even dash down to the corner of the canvas to confirm the name of the artist behind the artwork in front of you. Similarly, I know a Kiese Laymon cadence, a Samantha Irby turn-of-phrase, or a Hanif Abdurraqib pacing without ever once needing to glance up at a byline or back to a book’s title page. And if you’re familiar with these authors, I bet you do too. This is because these writers have writing voices as specific to themselves as a thumbprint. Can you correctly guess which writer wrote which of the paragraphs below?

“When I moved to Kalamazoo from Chicago, I thought for sure that I was going to be happy staying at home and never going outside. And, for the most part, I am. I get to travel and work in fancy cities with mass transit and Ethiopian food, then come back and pay $1.87 for a gallon of gas for the car that I can park anywhere on my sprawling 2,000 acres of land that were practically free. Okay, I’m exaggerating, but my point is FUCK THE CITY.” (Source)

“But my home training, which is actually far more tactile and superb than my religiosity, teaches me that we have to look the humiliation directly in the face, and describe what we see. And question what we feel. How is this nation ‘gifting’ any nation in this world hundreds of millions of dollars in violence or ‘defense’ against poor missile-less people when it owes my grandmama — a poor missile-less American worker, a granddaughter of the enslaved, a survivor of Jim Crow, Ross Barnett, Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Trump, an architect of impeccable home training — all the healthy choices, all the second chances, and the sincere question of what can we do to repair what we have destroyed?” (Source)

“I don’t remember when it was that I realized that the bald Black men I loved had once had hair, or that they put work into keeping their heads clean. My father and grandfather both had bald heads, and they both had thick, coarse beards that they cared for rigorously. The scent of my father’s beard oil arrived in rooms before he did, and lingered long after he left. He approached his beard care with precision and tenderness—his fingers shuffling through the hair on his chin when he spoke or listened intently, a comb almost always peeking out from his front pocket. Because I came into the world loving men who had no hair on their heads but cared for what hair they did have—bursting from their cheeks, or curved around their upper lips like two beckoning arms—it seemed that this was a kind of sacrifice made in the name of loving well, of having something that a small child could reach up and bury their hands in.” (Source)

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I’ve spent decades writing personal essays about my lived experience with an eating disorder, which I developed when I was 12 years old after my mother died of metastatic breast cancer.

For a long time, I wrote these essays in a way that would have readers believe I was fully recovered. But had readers been able to peer beneath the surface of those words, they would have seen a different reality—of a woman who still lived with the imprints of her disorder and wasn’t fully over it.

After years of getting treated for anorexia, I was ashamed to admit I wasn’t fully recovered. I wanted to write a book about my experiences, but I thought I had to be on the other side of anorexia before I could do so. The only books I’d ever read about eating disorders were written from the perspectives of clinicians or people who were recovered, so I thought I had to be too. Articles in the media didn’t prove to be helpful either, with their lack of attention to (or complete omission of) the messy middles that people find themselves in while working through recovery.

So often, I would read articles describing people who had struggled with eating disorders (or other mental health issues) and had come to a place where the disorder was no longer an issue in their lives. The stories had beginnings and ends, but they were missing middles—the setbacks and small victories that lie between the origins of a disorder and one’s recovery from it. Recovery was often confined to one or two sentences marked by triumphant words: overcome, achieved, conquered.

I saw my false narrative reflected in those stories—the one where I pretended to be “all better.” But I didn’t see my actual narrative, and that lack of a mirrored image left me feeling deeply misunderstood. I began to think that eating-disorder recovery was an untold—or at best half-told—story.

As a journalist and writer, I found myself wanting to change that by telling more stories about what I call “the middle place”—the liminal space between acute sickness and full recovery. So many of us navigate the middle place as we work our way toward illness, and yet we don’t talk about it nearly enough.

The longer the form, the more freedom you have to explore life’s middle places. In my memoir SLIP, liked having so much space to delve deeply into my life as a woman in the middle place. But I’ve found that even in shorter-form personal essays, there is room for exploration.

If you’re in need of a creative spark, or a different angle for your next essay, consider exploring the middle place. In my mind, the best memoirists and essayists do this.

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Over the weekend, while on a family vacation at the beach, I met a friend of my brother-in-law who had recently read an essay of mine on the World Wide Web. He mentioned, off-handedly, that he had enjoyed it, and I immediately clenched all of my clenchable muscles. There are few things more threatening than making small talk with a nice person.

But, friends, I’m a professional, so instead of spontaneously sobbing or shouting “LIAR,” I simply smiled and said, “Thank you.” That’s my life hack right there. It’s obvious, but it never hurts to be reminded that no writer is an island.

When someone says, “I read your thing” or “I liked your thing,” it is appropriate to reply, “Thank you.” It is also easy to remember. You can say it while secretly perspiring.

One of the most predictable consequences of being published is that someone will read your work—maybe not millions of someones, or even dozens, but someone. And no matter how many times I write an essay, or an op-ed, or a reported feature, or even a memoir, I’m still surprised that anyone out there reads it. Surprised and panicked.

(A side note: There are plenty of authors who do not suffer from crippling social anxiety. I aspire to their calm.)

This tension, between wanting to be seen and fearing daylight, defines my creative life. I crave attention, and yet, when it’s given, especially in the form of superficial and well-meaning praise, I want to hide under a bridge.

There's a famous bon mot from Dorothy Parker that goes “I hate writing but love having written.” I don’t agree with Mrs. Parker. I am one of the few writers who enjoys the safety and solitude of writing. What’s difficult for me is making direct eye contact with someone who has just sat in my prose like a hot tub.

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There’s an essay I’ve been trying to write for over four years. I start a new version every other month or so, write to 1,200 or 1,400 words, and then drop it into my Drafts folder and never go back. It’s very difficult to look at those many dozens of drafts and not feel despair. It’s hard to see them as anything other than wasted time and creative effort, evidence of my pursuit of something that I may never be able to actually fully realize.

In simplest terms, the essay I’m failing to write is about my brother and his struggles with addiction—the way his addiction has reshaped our family, and the way it has reshaped me. But the story keeps changing because in a narrative sense, I’m still mid-story. My brother has not yet met one of the only two endpoints that exist in addiction. There is no neat conclusion to offer, no redemptive arc to tie up with a bow. The story isn’t behaving like a personal essay, not yet moving from crisis to resolution, from wound to wisdom.

It’s a frustrating place to be because my response to anything is to write through it. I want, more than anything, to write every granular part of this, and to shape that writing into something I can share with the wider world. Then I won’t have to be alone with it anymore.

Right now, whenever I approach the material I get a shallow feeling in my gut—like a hesitancy, but I’m not the one hesitating. Rather, it’s the story that is hesitating to meet the page. There have been past times when I’ve experienced the opposite: I’ve come to the page too emblazoned, rife with a need for retribution or revenge. Then, too, the essay would retreat, refusing to be captured by anger and forced into premature meaning.

Still—how I feel right now, in this liminal space of my brother’s illness, is itself a story worth sharing regardless of narrative arc. I write it all down in my journal, and I keep coming back to the page, to the messy folder of my essay drafts, hoping that this time I’ll be able to say the thing I haven’t yet been able to put into words. This is the ever-present dance between writer and story, between readiness and resistance.

If you’re new to personal essay writing, you might think that having something important to say is enough to craft a quality piece of writing, but importance isn’t the same as readiness, and readiness isn’t the same as completion. Sometimes the most essential stories are the ones that refuse to be told too quickly.

The Myth of the Perfect Moment

A common wisdom given by writing instructors is to write about a difficult thing when we have distance from it, when we’ve gained some perspective and, in theory, know how the story ends. But what of stories without ends? Some stories are processes, ongoing conditions of being human. My brother’s illness is not a chapter in my life with neat marcations at its beginning and end. It’s more like a weather system I live under: sometimes sunny, sometimes stormy, always present.

I’m working to extract myself from the belief that I need to wait for the right moment to write about it. I used to think I needed either tragedy or triumph, recovery or death. That binary thinking has kept me holding on to a story I’m desperate to tell. It has also kept me from seeing the story as it is: the story of loving someone as they are disappearing, the story of hope becoming a kind of violence, the story of learning to live with unresolved grief.

The myth of the perfect moment suggests that stories ripen like fruit, becoming sweeter and more digestible with time, but some stories are more like wine—they develop complexity, but they also develop bite. They become harder to consume, not easier.

What the Rehearsal Drafts Teach Us

My early drafts were about my anger: at my brother, at my parents, at everything my family has lost to the ongoing saga of this illness. Those drafts weren’t the essay I want to write, but they were necessary. They are middle drafts, trying to make sense of things, sorting out patterns and meaning amidst the chaos, but ultimately built on premature conclusions.

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What Is Good Writing?

When I was a freshman in college, I took an introduction to writing course with a literature professor who had the reputation of being the toughest, most ruthless instructor in the department. He was reputed to be stingy with doling out As (although grade inflation was already a lost cause) and insensitive to students’ entreaties for leniency and compassion. So, of course, that was the class and the teacher I chose to take. I fancied myself a talented writer (hadn’t I won awards for it and been told I was a rare “jewel in the rough” back at my public high school in a small town in South Georgia?) who would impress him and, thus, be vaulted to the heights of academic and, eventually, literary stardom.

Oglethorpe University’s collegiate gothic campus building, modeled after Oxford’s Corpus Christi College, was everything I could imagine for my university debut. As Dr. Brightman entered the room on that sunny September day wearing his faded blue jeans and classic Birkenstocks, he seemed like an amiable mix of erudite imp and aging hippie. The first assignment he gave us seemed easy enough. But it was a trap.

“What is good writing?” he asked us, and then told us that we’d write on the topic. I don’t remember the page count or if there were more defined parameters, but I know that I, like everyone else in the class, was thrown for a loop. I spent the week trying to figure out how to write an essay about the act of writing. I also don’t recall all details of what I wrote in that paper, but I do think I was satisfied that I’d explained how good writing connects with the reader. It conveys emotions or something profound and makes an impact. I turned it in and then waited for the results.

The next class, Dr. Brightman revealed that everyone had failed but there was one paper that had received a D. The horror on our faces! This was a small, private liberal arts school that attracted a cross-section of overachievers who, although we may not have gotten into Ivys or matriculated to a more prestigious name-brand school, still believed in our brilliance. None of us had ever received anything close to a C in years—and especially not in a writing course. It was comical to then see us all vie for that D. None of us could be complete losers.

“The grades don’t matter,” he then confessed with a wicked grin. “The writing does.”

His point, I eventually came to understand, was that we had all tried to explain what “good writing” was rather than do it. The only way we could have impressed him in our essays was to actually have done the thing that we purported to understand. In short, our writing should have been better. The assignment may have been a bit of pedagogical shock-and-awe, but the lesson stuck with me. It’s a question I’ve been asking and attempting to answer for the past thirty years.

Rejection Makes You Feel Like Shit—But Doesn’t Mean You’re a Failure

Only recently have I started to promote an idea of “good enough” writing. And that’s because “good writing” is a subjective thing. When I receive a rejection—and let’s face it, the majority of writers’ lives is about handling rejection—I interrogate everything. Every word choice or grammatical decision is a clue; every linguistic flourish is a potential culprit. My attempt to ferret out the offending part, to make it “perfect,” is undertaken in a vain hope that it will never happen again.

It’s also why I have dozens of short stories, just as many personal essays, and more random scrivenings locked away as Google docs, on thumb drives (and probably some floppy disks), or tucked into folders that have never been published. Yes, part of that is due to gatekeeping by editors and opaque publishing guidelines. Some of the writings are juvenile or half-baked and need more time to gestate or for me to gain new insights. Yet the reason many of these good pieces of writing remain unpublished can be attributed to an embarrassment that my ideas and confabulations aren’t “good enough” because an anonymous other said, “Sorry, but no,” and I scurried away like a crab and didn’t try again.

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In 2006, less than a year after earning an MFA in fiction, I found myself staring at my laptop screen, uninspired by the various short story drafts I had started. I felt called instead to write in a genre that my education hadn’t covered: memoir. Though I’d just spent two years (and thousands of dollars on tuition) inventing characters and situations—or disguising my true stories—I wanted to make art not from invention but from distillation, to mine my memory for details and refract them through the lens of my inner eye.

Because I’d never had instruction or mentorship in creative nonfiction, when it came to navigating the ethics of writing (and publishing) about other people, the only advice I had to guide me was this pithy quote by Anne Lamott from her classic handbook, Bird by Bird. Lamott offers, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.”

At the time, it felt like the only advice I needed. Permission to tell my own truth was an important starting point, and I understand why this quote is so widely shared. When many of us begin writing, we fear the taboos we may break and the secrets we might uncover. We have, in spite of this fear, the right to speak our truths. In fact, for many of us, the allure of writing is that it allows us to reclaim autonomy, to center ourselves in a world that has too often treated us as peripheral.

But the limitations of Lamott’s advice are embedded in her phrase “they should have behaved better.” The quote infers that the writer has free rein to explore the ways they’ve been wronged. But what about when the dynamic you’re exploring is not that straightforward? What about when your story is tied not to someone’s cruelty, but to their vulnerability?

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A few years ago, I found myself at a crossroads. I wanted to write. I needed to write. But I couldn’t. I’d find myself in front of my laptop staring at the screen, the cursor blinking, and nothing would form. I couldn’t even write a sentence to revise. I was completely and utterly stuck. As the months passed, nothing changed, and I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to get out of the hole. A friend, one creating in a completely different genre as a musician, told me my problem was I was pulling and pulling from my creative well and putting nothing back in. I’d finally hit the last drops and without change I would continue to run dry.

I’d never thought about writing as a well. If that was what existed inside me, it had always been an infinite source I could pull from whenever and however I wanted. Many years of my writing process worked exactly like this. I wanted to write and so I sat down with a blank screen or a blank page and the words would just come. I’d grown accustomed to overwriting and boundless curiosity that I never truly worried would end. Until one day the words didn’t come, and I found myself scrambling to figure out how I’d lost my words. Except I hadn’t really lost them. I just needed to figure out a new way to get the words from my brain onto the paper and make sure I had the tools to adjust if I found myself in the same situation again. Fixing a problem I didn’t realize I had required me to change the way I thought about my creative process. Two new approaches helped me fill up the empty creative well inside me until before I knew it the words were flowing again.

Input vs. Output: For most of my years writing I only considered my practice as output. And even though I was reading, watching movies, listening to music, and collecting art, I hadn’t considered these integral parts of how I created. I could always see the beauty in all of it, but I hadn’t given much thought to the ways the artists had created them and how our paths as artists of all ilk ran parallel. When I hit that wall, I had to rethink that.

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by Nancy Slonim Aronie

Discipline may not be your problem. Confidence might be the block. Or comparing yourself to your favorite writer could be your nemesis. Or maybe it’s a fear of putting yourself out there, revealing your deepest, darkest wounds for all the world to see.

One of the problems with writing an essay, and maybe writing anything, is your Uncle Max. Remember when he said, “You can’t make money as a writer. Go to nursing school, honey”? Or your high school English teacher, who thought he was being funny when he held up your paper in front of the whole class and said, “Keep your day job”? Or just your own inner critic whispering, then yelling, “Who do you think you are? What, you’ve got something so interesting to say that everyone needs to hear it?” Or maybe your inner Eeyore tells you, “Everything’s been said before, so why even try?”

Let’s disarm these ogres one by one, shall we?

Nothing Compares to You

Who wants to follow Emerson or C.S. Lewis or Susan Sontag? Who wants to compete with James Baldwin and George Orwell? Who wants to come up against the likes of Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, or Angela Davis? If I compared myself to Anna Quindlen, I’d never write another word.

Actually, I did try to get Anna Quindlen’s job. It was 1994, and I had just heard an interview with her on NPR. She announced she was leaving her coveted perch at The New York Times, where she had gained a huge national following for her column “Life in the Thirties.” She was leaving because she wanted to write novels and be home with her kids. I didn’t have any desire to write novels, and at that point I desperately wanted to be away from my kids.

So, after I turned off the radio, I gathered a bunch of my pieces that had aired on NPR’s All Things Considered or been published in various newspaper Sunday magazines, put them in a big manila envelope, and addressed them to Times Executive Editor Abe Rosenthal.

In those days I swung between positively knowing that I would never be able to write another good sentence and having the balls to apply for Anna Quindlen’s actual position at The (excuse me) New York Times.

One of the things I say over and over in the writing workshops I teach is, “Don’t compare yourself to ANYONE!!!” So instead of measuring yourself to Zadie Smith or Mary Kerr or Flannery O’Connor (God knows I tried to be her for years), let your favorite one become your inspiration, your teacher, your muse. Read their work, and then sit down and write as a tribute to them.

Of course, when I go to write a new piece myself, I realize that not falling into the comparison well is easier said than done. When you feel yourself starting to slip is precisely when you block your ears or take a gummy or become your own dearest friend — and you sit down and write the damn thing.

Your Story Has Never Been Told

If you read an essay someone else wrote about being a kid whose mother died in a car wreck, and that’s exactly what happened to you, it’s foolishness to think there’s no point in writing yours. No one else can write your story. No one else had your back porch with the loose step, no one else had your Aunt Esther with the space between her front teeth, no one else got bubble gum stuck in her braids and had all her hair cut off the day before her first day of sixth grade at a new school but you. No one else is you.

If you get intimidated, it will stop you. Don’t stay in the shadows thinking, Well, no one will be that interested. How will you know if anyone would be interested if you never even put it into words?

I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all either heard the question “Who do you think you are?” or “What makes you think anyone would care about your story?” or we’ve uttered it to ourselves. So many of us have been told “You’re not good enough,” “There’s only so much to go around,” “Only certain people get published,” “You’re not thin enough,” “You’re not pretty enough,” and on and on. But what we all have in common is that little wise person in our bellies that, if we listen hard enough, we can hear say, People will care. Yes, you are good enough. You are indeed. You are everything. You are the universe. And the universe takes orders well. Now go write about whatever it is your unique personal history tells you to write.

If you need a little more of a mindset shift, go buy a Ganesh (remover of obstacles) to keep on your desk. Go pick out your outfit for your big meeting with your editor. Go rehearse your gratitude speech thanking your agent and your mother . . . and me. 😂

Or just sit down and write.

Sharing Is Caring for Yourself

Essay writing is personal. Sharing what you think about a certain topic is risky. Especially if what you think is not what everyone else thinks. Writing an essay is like playing strip poker when you didn’t wear enough layers so of course you keep losing.

Whether it’s for school or work or because you have a response to something that’s going on in your neighborhood, your town, or the world and you just want to get your take on it out there, you are going to be seen without your skivvies.

But revealing yourself in this way is a gift. You get to express your innermost thoughts rather than letting them marinate inside you in an imaginary conversational stew.

The thing to remember when you feel uncomfortable or insecure about coming out and letting people know who you really are is that the alternative is not good for the soul or the body.

Think about a nice piece of steak or fish or chicken or even asparagus or broccoli. When you marinate it and wait too long to cook it, it grows white fuzz. The meat actually becomes rancid, or the veggies get limp and slimy. I guarantee that if you don’t get your pressing ideas out of your pancreas, your liver, or your heart, those organs will punish you for not letting your wisdom see the light of day.

Would you please just treat yourself the way you would your best friend? When you start doubting yourself and saying mean things to yourself, pretend you’re your BFF and say nice things to cheer yourself on instead. My gramma used to say, “Play nice, children, play nice.” So when you’re being tough on yourself, I offer you her words: Play nice, play nice.

At least write it. Then decide whether you want to share it with the world.

The Writing Gods Will Meet You Halfway

I have also learned that when you are willing to work, even if you only go halfway, the universe becomes your partner. If you’re in the middle of writing a piece and you need the name of a river that begins with a P and has four syllables, the phone will ring, and your friend will breathlessly tell you about her Viking River Cruise down the Pilcomayo River. Pil-co-ma-yo. How does that happen? I’ll tell you how it happens. The writing gods who live under your desk are watching all the time. You commit. They come out.

Oh and PS. I didn’t get Anna’s job.

No one did. She wasn’t replaced.

Excerpted from the book Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay Copyright © 2024 by Nancy Slonim Aronie. Reprinted with permission from New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com

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Nancy Slonim Aronie is the founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop on Martha’s Vineyard and the author of Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay, Memoir as Medicine and Writing from the Heart. A regular commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, Aronie has taught at Harvard University and conducted writing workshops and lectures at Kripalu, Omega, Esalen, Rowe Conference Center, Wainwright House, and the Open Center in New York City. She lives with her husband on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. You will find her online at ChilmarkWritingWorkshop.com.

See past essay writing tips

Hear Kelli at Open Secrets Live May 3!

Once, when I was emceeing the open mic portion of a funeral (I have a very, very strange niche as a comedian), an organizer informed me that everyone who had signed their name on the clipboard to speak had already done so.

“Can you check if there’s anyone else?” she whispered.

I stepped to the podium and began, “So, um, for the first time in queer history, um, running early.”

The attendees were broken-hearted. And because of the circumstances surrounding the person’s death, many were also mad. Really mad. At the deceased and also—again, because of some very specific circumstances—at each other.

Nevertheless, they laughed.

They laughed because they needed to.

And that is precisely why a little humor in a personal essay is often a gift for the reader.

Write First, Make Jokes Later

One of my first paid writing gigs was at Au Courant, a sadly deceased Philly gay paper, where I wrote a weekly humor column I had (hilariously, it seemed at the time) named Trippin’ Out.

It was the 90s. Eighty-seven percent of all public queer culture had a moniker that paired a gerund with the word “out.”

Because Au Courant was printed on actual paper with actual space limitations, Trippin’ Out had to be within a dozen words of the 500-word count I was permitted. It also had to match the theme of the periodical that week—sometimes a controversial issue, but more often a local event.

Almost every Thursday afternoon, I would call my best friend (who, by the way, had no relationship to the paper; she was just being a good friend) in a panic I tried to cover with hyperbolically feigned casual conversational intent: “So, um, the Devon Horse Show. I’m just wondering if there’s anything funny and, um, gay about it.”

The patient and caring editor once returned what was apparently a particularly hacky piece of writing with the note: “Kelli, you can’t base an entire column on one joke.”

Read more

Open Secrets Magazine editor Rachel Kramer Bussel here. Since we’re in a new year, have published over 70 personal essays, along with memoir excerpts, will be celebrating two years of publishing Open Secrets Magazine in April 2025 (here’s our very first essay), and are hosting our first event, personal storytelling summit Open Secrets Live on May 3 in New York City, I decided to launch several new columns this year, in addition to our Dear Daddy advice column.

This one will feature essay writing tips and advice, as well as general guidance about how to go about the business of being an essay writer, by rotating authors. This post will be free, but future posts in this category will be for paid subscribers only.

I decided to open this column with my tips on getting published in Open Secrets Magazine, to try to save my limited time as a new mom, and to save writers time so they aren’t submitting the kind of writing that’s unlikely to get accepted. Currently, we are only accepting personal essay submissions for our new Climate vertical. Here are the Climate section essay writing guidelines. If we get enough paid subscribers, donations, and/or grants or other funding, I hope to issue a new general call for essays later in the spring. To all who you submitted to our previous calls for essays, thank you, whether or not we were able to publish your work.

My biggest writing tip, which applies to submitting essays to Open Secrets Magazine or anywhere else, is to closely read the publication you plan to submit work to. I tend to write highly detailed writing guidelines, a practice I developed after editing dozens of anthologies, in order to cut back on receiving work that doesn’t fit what I’m looking for.

After our first Open Secrets Magazine call for submissions, I realized that many writers submitting their work were unfamiliar with what we publish, which was reflected in their submissions, so I changed our guidelines to require submitters to be subscribers. Yes, that also helps us build a following, but the main reason was to try to ensure that those sending me their work were aware of the types of writing we publish. Also, since these are personal essays, write them yourself. Don’t use AI and think it can replicate your voice.

My next writing tip is: Be unique! I sometimes receive multiple essays on a given subject that, when read back to back, tend to blend together in my mind, even if they’re well written. I can’t speak for other editors, but I can say I’m looking for memorable, emotionally resonant essays, the kind that make readers think and feel, that make them feel less alone, that make them return to that essay or cite it when talking to friends.

I believe that part of why Rob Hart’s essay “After a Splashy Book Deal, I Got Dropped By My Publisher, But I Kept On Writing” has been our most-read essay in the history of Open Secrets Magazine by far, and resonated deeply with so many readers, is that while he’s describing his personal journey navigating the highs and lows of publishing, he’s also reflecting back other people’s experiences to them. I would imagine that almost any writer who’s sent out their work has experienced rejection in some form, and likely a degree of envy over the perceived success of other writers in their genre or field.

Hart shows via his personal story that even if from the outside a writer (and, by extension, anyone in a creative career, or perhaps anyone more broadly) looks successful (a subjective term), what’s happening behind the scenes may not reflect that, or they may not feel successful. His story also shows that one success is usually not enough to live off of indefinitely, unless you’re one of the extremely rare writers who hit it so big that that’s not the case. But readers may have only seen the external markers of one aspect of success and made assumptions based on that.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for when I tell you, write an essay that resonates widely like this one did, but I knew when reading that essay it would likely be one readers gravitated toward because Hart was vulnerable in his telling of it. He took emotional and professional risks by revealing aspects of his path through book publishing that are often hidden because writers rightly want to project an image of upward momentum.

I know I tend not to write too often about the downsides and rejections I face, partly because of that desire to look like I’m more in control of my career than I am, and partly because I want to focus on the projects I’m hopeful about, rather than those that are floundering. So for me as a reader and editor, I thought Hart’s approach was brave and bold.

Writing about work and career can be so fraught, especially if we are still in a specific job or career, which is why, in a similar way, Katrina Jackson’s essay, “This Job Will Kill Me If I Let It,” about the lack of work-life balance in academia and the physical and mental toll that’s taken on her, is one whose vulnerability and openness I hope to see more of in my inbox. With both of these essays, you’ll see readers in comments left soon after publication and later on, sharing their own career struggles. That’s how I as an editor tend to know if an essay has landed, and if it covers a topic or approach I should seek out when selecting future essays.

One of the most memorable essays for me, one that I return to when I’m feeling uncertain about some of my own writing and how much to reveal, is Caren Gussoff Sumption’s, “For 42 Years, I’ve Lived with Chronic Suicidal Ideation.” It’s not a topic I’ve seen written about much in such a raw and open way, and it’s a tricky subject to navigate. I struggled as an editor with whether it was ethical to publish this essay, but ultimately did, with resources linked at the bottom, because it speaks to one of the reasons I started Open Secrets Magazine: to make readers feel less alone, to make them feel seen and heard, to let them know that someone else out there (and likely many someones) is struggling in ways that they are or have.

Third, remember you are writing a personal essay. While other outlets accept op-eds or opinion pieces that argue for a particular cause or outcome, Open Secrets Magazine is focused on personal essays, with an emphasis on the personal. This doesn’t mean the essays have to be apolitical, but this isn’t a place for arguing on behalf of laws or changes in policy, though those can be mentioned if relevant to the personal aspects. I receive a good number of essay submissions that read like they’d be more at home in a newspaper’s op-ed section than in Open Secrets Magazine, which goes back to why I require submissions to come from subscribers who have presumably read some of our essays and have easy access to our personal essay archives.

My final essay writing tip is related to the second one: Make sure you’re telling a story with a beginning, middle, and end that has a takeaway. Many of the essay submissions I receive are about something that happened to the author, but they stop there. They’re a relatively straightforward account of what happened, without even an allusion to why it happened and how they author felt about it.

I want to know not just about what the author went through, but how they made sense of it, how it impacted them, how they handled or are handling it. I want to know what it feels like to be them and face that situation or challenge. I want to feel like I know that author, not in a parasocial way, but as one human to another. I want to feel like I was there with the author going through the experience, and gain insights into what they learned from it.

I hope you’ve found this helpful. If you have, please consider sharing this essay and, if you haven’t already, becoming a paid subscriber to access future installments of our essay writing tips column. Your shares, likes, and comments helped us double our subscriber base in 2024. Thank you so much, and I look forward to a 2025 filled with learning from many more writers.

See our writing guidelines section for our latest call for submissions.

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