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Creative Nonfiction or The Personal Essay

Phillip Lopate, editor, *The Art of the Personal Essay* Creative Nonfiction Notes from the Introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay By Philip Lopate Intimacy—the hallmark of the personal essay. The essayist confides to you personally, establishing a kind of friendship based on identification, understanding, testiness, and companionship Unity of Human Experience—personal essays presuppose that there is a unity to human experience. Each person is a specimen representing the entire human race, so that when essayists explore themselves, they are studying all of us. These essays are democratic, emphasizing experience over status. Lee Gutkind, editor of *Creative Nonfiction* Honesty, Confession, and Privacy—with a frank, conversational manner, the writer creates a contract with the reader, promising as much honesty as possible. The struggle for honesty is the central ethos of the personal essay. Part of the drama, suspense, or plot is in watching how far the essayist can drop past his or her psychic defenses toward deeper levels of honesty. The narrators must be reliable; we must trust their core of sincerity. Part of that trust is based, paradoxically, on the writers’ exposure of their own betrayals, uncertainties, and self-mistrust—the sincerity arises from their awareness of their own potential for insincerity. Their confessions are not typically lurid, but concern habits of thought, irritations, jubilations, aches and pains, humorous flashes, and puzzlements. (Some contemporary writers, such as Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, and Dorothy Allison, fetishize the shocking confession.) Even when they are excruciatingly frank, they are also intriguingly protective of their privacy. Contractions and Expansions of Self—as often as they tell us they know, they confess that they don’t know, and why. They follow the clue of their ignorance through the maze, and are intrigued with their limitations. Rather than the expansive and grandiose, they have a taste for littleness and practice the inverse of boasting, taking pride in the small, humble things, making the small loom large. You start with a small package of self-confessed flaws and limitations, then suddenly find the essay expands by virtue of the writer’s self-knowledge; confessing one’s limits leads to infinite opening-out. The harvesting of self-contradiction is an intrinsic part of the form. The goal is not necessarily to win the reader’s unqualified love, but to present a complex human portrait. The Craft According to Gutkind Contrariety—the role is often to go against the grain of convention or popular opinion, demonstrating idiosyncrasy and independence, hiding a fear of staleness and cliché. The enemy of the essayist is self-righteousness, not only because it is tiresome and ugly, but because it slows down the dialectic of self-questioning. Avoidance of Egotism—because it’s impolite to talk much about oneself, essayists and readers get uneasy with the personal essay, and we are taught never to use the first person singular. The self-deprecation so pervasive in this art form is the result of the effort to ward of the accusation of vanity or self-absorption. E. B. White is considered one of the most self-effacing personal essayists. The essayist asserts that one is not important, except insofar as one’s example can serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish. Cheek and Irony—essayists have a penchant for outbreaks of mischievous impudence. It keeps readers alert and cuts through the pious and commonplace. Part of what gives them the license to be cheeky is their suspicion that they are not performing in the central ring of the literary circus, but are content in their self-imposed role of second-class citizen. It is the satisfaction of an undisciplined existence. The Best American Essays Idler Figure—as part of the stance of ironic modesty, they often present themselves as loafers, inactive or tangential to the marketplace. Perhaps by affecting the role of lazy scribbler, they make themselves out to be harmless and able to poke fun at will. Note the titles of some of the most famous essay series: The Idler, The Rambler, The Spectator, The Tatler. The uninvolved and shiftless position allows for ironic observation of human dealings, engaging the curiosity, allowing the risk of openness, the willingness to reflect, to perceive freely, and to fascinate oneself with the act of perception. Only the idle are able to practice seeing. The Past, the Local, and the Melancholy—these essays commonly delve into the past, particularly the local and personal past. They also often slip into a melancholy tone that might be called the voice of middle age, as it is the fruit of ripened experience, which naturally has some worldly disenchantment and a taste for equilibrium, an almost unnerving calm that often pervades the personal essay. It is the by-product of a developed sense of selfhood. It is difficult to write analytically in the midst of confusion, and youth is a confusion in which the self and its desires have not yet sorted themselves out, and it still seems one can become everything one desires. The personal essayist looks back at the choices made and what might be called “the catastrophe of personality.” Part of the wonder of this art form is that this bitter awareness is made appetizing and amusing. Best Writing Advice--The Paris Review Interviews Form and Style—it is notoriously flexible and adaptable. All subjects are linked and equally near each other. Most follow a circular, rather than chronological, pattern. It is open to digression and promiscuous meanderings. However, their supposed formlessness is more a strategy to disarm the reader with the appearance of unstudied spontaneity that a reality of composition. The essayist circles the subject and comes at it from multiple angles, and while the exploration seems to be widening, it is actually eliminating false hypotheses and narrowing its scope, zeroing in on its target. Although they technically aren’t stories, good essays are written by good storytellers, and the plot is often the track of one’s thoughts, with small suspense-building climaxes. They often have hidden themes buried within and uncovered by stealth, or multiple themes they braid. Quotation and the Uses of Learning—the stylistic functions of quotation are first, to lend authority, to indicate learning, The pleasure of knowing we are in cultivated hands, attending to a well-stocked, liberally educated mind, is a central attraction of the personal essay. Nowadays learning is conveyed not so much through the pomposity of quotation but through syntax. The goal is to put aside all pedantry and savor “light learning.” A Mode of Thinking and Being—an “essay” is an experiment, an attempt, a test, a heroic run at something not knowing whether or not there is anything worthy to be found. It’s a mental climate dead set against dogma, unashamed of subjectivity, and mistrustful of the value-free, objective claims of scholarship and science. One of its most intriguing features is to lay bare its own process as it goes along, creating the appearance of spontaneous composition, but masking a good deal of artistry. Essayists give you their thoughts—and how they came by them. This self-reflection that essay writing demands influence the writers’ lives, forcing them to fashion and compose themselves for their readers and in so doing, clarify and shape their own inner lives. The writing monitors the self and helps it gel. It is an enactment of the creation of the self. As a mode of being it models a way for the self to function with relative freedom in an uncertain world: be skeptical but gyroscopically poised, undeceived but finally tolerant of flaws and inconsistencies. It suits the modern existential condition of having nothing particularly solid to cling to and accepting that one has to make one’s self up from moment to moment. It is not philosophy, it is not science, but it is a mode of inquiry. Refutation is not a defeat, but an advancement toward truth as valuable as confirmation.