Okay – no more cable news, no more three newspapers every morning, no more checking into Huffington Post, Google News et al. Back to work. And in this spirit I’m posting the first step from my article for the Writer Magazine.

Step One:

      The milestones of your life can be subjects for personal essays – marriage, divorce, the death of a beloved pet, moving to a new town, having a baby, a child going off to college. Also smaller subjects, the trials and trivia of daily life – a messy desk, finding parking places, an attempt to keep up with e-mail. (The word essay comes from the French word essai, meaning “a trial or attempt”.)

      Whoever you are and whatever the circumstances of your life, you have a wealth of material to draw on for your personal essay. Ask yourself what recent events or struggles, trivial or traumatic, have caused you to change in small ways or large. What has happened in your life to make you question old beliefs and habits? Or to suddenly appreciate and illuminate your beliefs? 

      I recently signed a contract to write an essay for an anthology and the subject was whether I had followed through on dreams I’d  had as a kid, or did my life veer off into surprising new directions? Since I didn’t come up with this subject,  I had no idea what I was going to write or how to write it.  Finally I did what I always tell my students to do: I just got something down on paper. A memory of dancing in front of a Christmas tree, the summer I gave a play in my backyard.  It was messy writing, flat and kind of dumb; I had no idea where it would lead. But I kept writing and gradually an essay began to take shape and what I was writing didn’t seem quite so dumb.

      This is the first step: simply begin.