Lessons From My First Personal Essay
Courtesy Elya K. Studios
I published my first personal essay for TODAY Digital this month. I have been wanting to write more about parenting. Specifically, I want to try and carve out a little niche as a dad who is very engaged with his kids, but also struggles under the massive weight of modern parenting. This was my first crack at it, and I hope you enjoy! I also hope I’ll have more writing on this topic soon.
But in the meantime, I wanted to share some reflections I had on the craft of producing the piece, as it was not only the first time I wrote about parenting, but also the first time I wrote from my own personal experience. I always love the “How Did This Get Made?” posts from Jen A. Miller (if you don’t subscribe to her newsletter, you should!) and so I’m cribbing some inspiration from her with this.
In no particular order, here are my reflections on personal essay writing:
Writing about yourself is hard! I have written many, many different pieces in many different voices using an author's personal experiences and stories. Almost everything I do combines some element of commentary or prescriptive nonfiction with a personal narrative to ground the advice being given in an accessible way. When I talk through with an author about what they want to write, I can usually grab onto a few specific personal anecdotes to help buttress their points.
But when I did this for myself - oh boy! It was so much harder. I know every single detail of my life. I can pull from literally everything - I have access to all the data! When I’m working with an author, I can ask pointed questions that surface the most relevant stories. I can’t do that for myself. For this essay, I had to think through every story or example that might fit, see which one is best, and then share it with the editor, who would say, “wait, this isn’t saying what you think it’s saying.” And then I would start all over, as I realized I was thinking about the storytelling wrong the entire time.
Making an argument using only personal stories is hard! While I use personal narrative all the time in my collaborations, working explicitly on a personal essay was something new for me. The first draft I delivered to the editor was probably closer to an op-ed than a personal essay, relying more on data and societal trends than my own experience. I was trying to make some high-minded arguments about the patriarchy and its effect on moms, and the editor, respectfully, responded to say that moms don’t need me to teach them about the patriarchy. Very true! I did another pass, and then another, each time removing more of the “social commentary” stuff and putting in more about my own personal experiences being a dad and a husband. Which was hard! (See above.)
It’s much easier, for me at least, to make an argument with data and research and trends, sprinkled in with some personal stories to contextualize the data, than to try and say something profound, or at least interesting, using only my own lived experience. It gave me a lot more respect for memoir authors and the ghostwriters who do memoir.
Self-examination is hard! My editor gave me a lot of great feedback on my drafts, and some of her comments cut right to my own sense of self as a dad and husband. Nothing identity-shattering, but many questions about the prose were actually questions about who I was and how I wanted to show up in the world. I was writing about my experience, so I needed to better understand what kind of person I wanted to be, and/or what kind of person I had been. (Since this essay was about parenting, my wife got sucked into the process as well, including some circular conversations about my dad-ness. She handled it with a lot of grace and patience. For her support on this and all of my writing, I’m eternally grateful.)
The resulting essay is not a full picture of who I am as a person or a dad or a husband. There’s no way to fully capture that essence for anyone, no matter how many words you get to use, much less shooting for a 1,000 word limit. But, through some soul-searching and good conversations with my wife, I was able to dig a little deeper and bring a little more nuance and authenticity to the piece.
Despite the process being hard, I enjoyed it and going outside my normal lane of writing pushed me to be a better writer. The next time I do it (which I hope is soon) I’ll be better equipped to deliver a better product.
