How Writing about Things is like other kinds of creative nonfiction: It is a searching piece of writing. It is writing to know. It is the writer asking a question and writing her way to an answer. In fact, perhaps more than any other sort of writing we have looked at, writing about things, or the personal essay, is exploratory writing. It is not about the finality of knowing for sure; it is about the uncertainty of trying to find out. Furthermore, it is writing from, as the phrase personal essay would suggest, your unique and idiosyncratic experience of the world. It is about you and your areas of interest and expertise. Your life experience will help you flesh out your argument. It is where your answer—and your question—will come from.
How Writing about Things is different than other kinds of creative nonfiction: Of late, the personal essay has been more about the personal and less about the essay. But the essay itself is a very old art form. The 18th Century French intellectual and critic Montaigne is frequently credited with having made the genre what we know it today, but there are versions of the essay in both a western and a nonwestern tradition. The tradition of the personal essay is a critical one—review writing in its best form is a kind of personal essay. Meditations on war and peace and culture and style, on quirky trends and larger, timeless concerns that define our shared humanity—all of this is the stuff of the traditional essay. It is an essay of philosophy. It is rigorous, but musing. As you will see from the readings we are doing for this part of class, the personal essay takes on issues and ideas that we are all aware of (or should be aware of), but looks at them from a personal perspective.
Public and Private: I have this paper be the last we write together because it is a good bridge from the more personal kind of writing that we’ve been doing all semester long into the more academic writing that you will need to do for most of your other classes in college. It is both personal—in that these are your ideas and your experiences and your interests. But it is also public—it’s about ideas that everyone could have an opinion about: some movie, some baseball game, some form of dance, some kind of hairstyle. Balancing the public and the private is a big part of this assignment.
Research: though it was never not allowed, research has not been a component of our writing this semester. This essay requires some. We will take some time to use the library to do this work. Too often when people find out that they have to do research they panic. Sometimes people think this means that having to include research means they can cheat. Well, really, the reason scholars quote is because they are demonstrating how they are a part of a community of other smart people who have other ideas about the same topic. Quoting and citation (how we put research in a paper) is how they show that they know who these other smart people are and what they are saying and how it is or is not related to what they are saying. Think of it this way. If you were eating dinner with your friends and you were all arguing about something you have an opinion about—a TV show, a call by a coach in a game, a new style in clothes—you’d all sit around and sort of listen to each other and shout at each other and interrupt and all of that. But you can’t do that in a research paper because, well, all the people you need to talk to aren’t actually in the room with you. So that’s why you quote. To bring these other smart people and their ideas into your paper just as if you were all sitting around a dinner table talking about your ideas.
Finally: The worst thing that happens when students write personal essays such as these is that they over do it by thinking they’ve got to pick some big topic like gun control. The key to successfully writing this essay is not about picking some big and emotional issue. It’s about dealing with whatever issue you choose (the consummate value of a movie like E.T. or Dirty Dancing or Pretty in Pink, the glory of a good cup of coffee, the art of ironing your father’s shirt) with honesty and intelligence and wit. This is perhaps the most creative essay you will write this semester. It is also the trickiest. Write well.