One of the best pieces of advice I ever got about personal essays came from one of my MFA teachers. “Read for theme,” she said. “Not plot, theme. Then write for theme.” Writing personal essays demands this; otherwise, we end up writing anecdotes or catalogues of events.
The dictionary defines an anecdote as “a short and amusing or interesting story about a real incident or person.” To that I would add it’s “something that limits, rather than expands, a personal story’s interest, and largely confines it to the people in the anecdote.” A harsher take would be “something that makes a story insular, provincial or boring.” Anecdotes are stories of limited scope, so they limit their readers.
When writing personal nonfiction, we should always be thinking about our audience, in the sense that we must remember that we want someone to read our stories. If you aren’t just writing for yourself─and writing for yourself has its own value─you need to think about how scenes and sentences will make readers respond. Will they be able to smell the smells we’re describing? Will they experience the emotions, or see the point, that we’re trying to elicit? Same goes for our text: is our approach too limited in that people won’t be able to relate?
Stories aren’t old friends we’ve known for so long that we have to endure them to the end. We’re not obligated to sit and listen. Just like books and magazines aren’t family reunions where we’re trapped by our uncle Jimmy, forced to listen to another story about his time vacationing in Fiji in the 1970s, drinking in exotic ports of call. Each story is one of thousands of options. We don’t have to buy them. We can start a magazine story and ditch it when bored. In a world of endless material, we don’t have to stick with anything. The writer’s job is to make readers stick with us. Theme is one way we connect our personal stories to the strangers who we want to read them.
Think of theme this way: themes make personal experience universal by relating your private experience to the reader’s experience, or to the larger human condition. Let the reader see themselves in you. They will if they can relate to you through your story’s theme. Themes expand the gaze of one person’s (usually our protagonist’s) life to reveal something larger about our culture, our times, and human relationships. Every story’s about something more than its events. Things happen, yes, but what do they tells us about ourselves and our world? You as the writer must really work that thematic vein beyond plot. You want to show the reader or editor why this story is relevant to other people, and even, to our times.
Themes are big picture. Meaning, theme is the big picture subject beyond the action and events of your story. It’s the larger topic that your experience relays: fear of aging; fear of dying; the loss of a parent; defeat; wasted potential; perseverance; race relations; the struggle of women in an unequal society; feeling lost. Those are universal themes because many people can relate to them. In his introduction to The Anchor Essay Annual, 1998, essayist Phillip Lopate put it this way: “To speak incessantly about the wounds or triumphs of I and My Family can get pretty tiresome; the trick is to project one’s experience on the page in such an enhanced, objectified way that it acquires, or merges with, a larger significance.” I is great. But when we are our stories protagonists, we must project our first-person experience on that larger canvas of universal experience to show, in Lopate’s words, how it connects with readers’ experience or lives. In The New Inquiry, Teju Cole put it another way. He said the writer’s job is “…to see this individual and that individual and you and me all caught up in the jaws of the same big complicated story.”
To see theme in action, read Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s essay “At a Certain Age” in Best American Essays 2000, and Paul Crenshaw’s “Concrete” in the North American Review. Think about how each story relates to the topic of theme. What did you like about each story? Now try to identify each story’s themes, not who did what in the plot, but its larger subject. Was it about: death? Aging? Ambition? That’s the theme. These essays are phenomenal.
When we’re writing personal nonfiction as the protagonist, we can start with something that happened to us, or we can start with some subject or event that we’re trying to understand. This can be a question: Why am I so fixated on the past? Or it can be an event: My parents gave me up for adoption at age two; at age forty-five, I finally met them. The word ‘essay’ comes from the French word assay, which means ‘to attempt;’ an essay is often an attempt to understand something. It’s a human mind working through an experience or subject, trying to make sense of it. Essays, therefore, don’t always come in the form of traditional narrative, with an arc or resolution. They can be digressive, tangential, anything really. But first-person narration doesn’t mean the story is insular or anecdotal, or just about us.
Your experience, and your unique perspective, are two of your greatest strengths as a nonfiction writer. Capitalize on them. Show us the world through your eyes. But also remember: you are also part of a larger story. You’re part of the human story, or the story of women in America, or the story of racial injustice and liberation, the story of people with Lyme disease, the story of Okies’ upward mobility, the story of bodies breaking down, of the lost finding themselves. We are not just an I. As a writer, remember how you fit in the world, that you are not an island. Look inside yourself, but also look up and outward. Keep one eye on the world. Show us ourselves in you.
As that same MFA teacher told me: “Readers don’t care about you; they care about themselves, so show them themselves in you.” That’s harsh, but it’s true a lot of the time. If we’re writing to be read, then we should remember that, at least in a softer way.