On meandering

As I mentioned in class the other day, though, formlessness is not necessarily a problem in a personal essay. Meandering can work--as long as as the meandering is interesting.

So, what is interesting? I think it is a good idea to try to anticipate the hard questions your readers may want to ask you about your subject. If your meandering takes you away from answering hard questions, then it may be counterproductive. Generally, it's better to meander towards risk, towards danger, and towards revelation, rather than to wander away from them. And once you've meandered into interesting terrain, details are crucial.

In any case, the more you write and the more you share your writing with others, the better sense you'll have of what your readers will find interesting.

IMAGE SOURCE:
www.markdixon.ca/images/meander_1_med_rgb.jpg

On starting with a bang

The longer you make the reader wait for unique, intriguing detail that makes your essay pop off the page, the greater risk that your readers will never make it in that far. Readers who are thumbing through magazines may not read your second sentence if they are not hooked by your first one. And they may not read your second paragraph, if they are not hooked by your first.

You don’t have to reveal all of your secrets at the outset, but I recommend that early on you give readers some explicit clues about what’s ahead.



IMAGE SOURCE:
http://www.hgsc.bcm.tmc.edu/downloads/graphics/Bang.jpg

On revealing sensitive details from your personal life

I can’t really tell you what to do as far as holding back on sensitive aspects of your personal life in the essay you turn in for this course. I suspect the more sensitive the details are, the more likely it is that they will capture the interest of your readers. Don’t reveal something you’ll regret later on, though. The grade you get will be on how effective the writing is, not how much you reveal about your personal life.

If you want to write a personal essay that you don’t want to share with the other members of the class, though, we can probably work something out (like, maybe they’ll only see parts of it).

IMAGE SOURCE:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/20060824-confessional.jpg

Please Read This

Please read this funny and knowledgeable essay on the essay, written by one of my favorite authors: British literary critic Terry Eagleton. I just came across it myself.

Essayists Must Tell the Truth

I've been thinking about the question Scott raised in our last class about the status of truth with regard to essay-writing and I thought I might share with you all the following note on the subject, which appears in the Fifth College Edition of Robert Atwan's The Best American Essays (Boston: Houghton, 2008). The words are those of Geoffrey Wolff [that's Wolff in the photo at right]:

"I work by Hemingway's precept that a writer's root charge is to distinguish what you really felt in the moment from the false sentiment of what you now believe you should have felt. The personal essay, autobiography, has been a red flag to professional classifiers and epistemologists; a critical industry has flourished for the refinement of generic protocols (many in French, with as much fine print as an installment purchase agreement), subcontracted principally to skeptics. In the judgment of Northrop Frye, for instance, a piece of work is shelved with autobiography or with fiction according to whether the librarian choose to believe it.


"Well. I've written one, and I've written the other, and I'm here to testify that the issue is at once weightier and simpler: a personal essayist means to tell the truth. The contract between a personal essayist and a reader is absolute, an agreement about intention. Because memory is fallible, and point of view by its nature biased, the personal essayist will tell a slant tale, willy-nilly. But not be design." (29)


I don't mean for this to be a definitive statement on the subject. I do like the advice given by Hemingway, though.

Ordinary thoughts, ordinary times

Here as promised are the audio clips of G. K. Chesterton. He was a large man (he makes an indirect joke about this in the clip in which he addresses the Canadian literary society).

Dead Man Laughing

The Art of the Personal Essay doesn't feature a lot of essays by female writers. For those of you who are sensitive to such things (and for those of you who are just interested in reading essays by some successful contemporary writers,) here's the opening paragraph of an essay from the New Yorker that I read and enjoyed recently . It's by Zadie Smith (that's Zadie in the photo at right) and it appeared in the December 22nd, 2008 issue. The full title of the essay is "Dead Man Laughing: Jokes run through a family." It is labeled a "Personal History." This essay, and Rosenblatt's "Making Toast" (which I distributed in class), offer an interesting contrast to Steele's "An Hour or Two Sacred To Sorrow" in the different ways that they process the death of a loved one through writing.

My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons’ “I’m Walking Backward for Christmas” got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick’s easy laughs—Benny Hill was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is “comedy snobs.”

If you are interested in reading the rest, click on this link .

The gentleman in the hat in the photo at left is Benny Hill.