I did an on-line interview a few months ago and thought I’d share the questions and answers with you –

1.      What types of life experiences make good essays?  What kinds do not?  I think any experience can make a good personal essay if the writer feels deeply enough about the experience - and has come to some kind of conclusion about it. Maybe learned something or recognized a truth. Or maybe just found the humor in a situation. I can't think of any experience – if it contains feeling and truth – that can't be written into an essay. It 's a journey you've taken through an experience and you've ended up in a different place.

2.      What are the basic elements of an essay?  What must every essay have?  A personal essay needs a beginning - an opening that will hook the reader into continuing to read to the end.  And the essay needs to be both terribly personal and at the same time universal – (the paradox of all personal non-fiction.) Readers won't connect with general details and proclamations – they want the writer's truth and experience in specific detail to connect with. The essay needs to mean something and not confuse the reader. It has a point, the writer is telling you this story for a reason.  (The fact is that I'm not at all clear on what the basic elements of an essay are – I relearn them every time I start a new essay.)

3.      How does an essay differ from a blog post?  (A wonderful question.) I write a  blog (www.WritingTime.net) and sometimes I feel that a post has turned into an essay - it goes somewhere. It has a beginning, a middle and an ending. A conclusion. But this is rare cause I write so many posts and so quickly.  I'm just going on and on about  guidelines for writing, or inspiration, or blithering about something in my personal life that connects to writing. This week I posted my chicken recipe!  So it's a real hodge podge of stuff. I guess the main difference is rewriting – when I write an essay I usually have to spend a lot of time working on it. Polishing. Letting it sit for awhile. And there's no time to do that with a blog.

4.      What tips would you offer new essay writers on how to focus their work?  Just how narrow does the topic for an essay need to be?  Again – focus on feeling. Something you felt sad about or frustrated, confused, or angry at. And how you got to the end of it, turned things around. Of course you can write about happiness too, but you need to write how you got there. How you figured things out – or didn't and learned to live with things as they are. It is hard to narrow down experience – I find I have to keep writing until I find what the essay is really about – and then I cut out everything that isn't necessary.  Also – I'd suggest starting with short essays of about 750 words. These are much more marketable than 3,000 word essays and easier to keep in focus.

5.      What is a take away?  Do all essays need them?  How should writers make sure the take away is present in their work? 

The take away is really what the writer learns, discovers, finds funny in the experience. It's the conclusion.  An essay also differs from a journal entry cause in your journal you can just write about how you feel. In an essay your feelings have to go somewhere, have to find a conclusion, some kind of change. The reader takes away some new understanding of the world, or a humorous slant, and – probably the most important thing a writer can give a reader: the sense that he or she is not alone in this world.  I think the shape of a personal essay is usually circular – and when I get stuck on the ending I go back to the beginning. 
 

6.      What other advice would you give unpublished essay writers?  That there's no better genre to start writing in than the personal essay. You have such a good shot at getting published. Especially if you also spend time studying the market – learning what magazines or newspapers or online publications are interested in your subject. The main reason writers don't get essays published is  they don't do their homework with the market. They're afraid to send their stuff out. So my best advice is to send out the essay and not take rejection slips too personally. All writers get rejected and we keep writing anyway.