Mastering the Personal Experience Article
by Deborah Newton
After Nora Ephron experienced a youthful incident that caused her some
pain, her mother told her to buck up because everything that happens to you
is copy. Copy. Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, "If you write about the
things and the people you know best, you discover your roots." And Ben
Franklin's autobiography contains the words, "The next thing most like
living one's life over again seems to be a recollection of that life, and to
make that recollection as durable as possible by putting it down in
writing."
Extrapolate those suggestions and what advice do you get? You should
write about what you know. What you've experienced. And what better form
to write about your life's happenings than in a personal experience article.
You've experienced things that can interest others. We all have. These
happenings don't have to be world-shattering -- just incidents that others
can relate to, that others may find meaningful. As long as you learned
something from the experience -- even something as small as allowing you to
see the incident in a new light -- others will be able to relate to it. Of
course, if the experience changed your life in a profound way, all the
better for this type of article. If you write about it with the right spin
and a
salable structure, you can earn respectable money by turning your own
personal experiences into articles.
Women's magazines such as Redbook and Ladies Home Journal, men's
magazines such as Details and Heartland USA, and even religious
magazines such as Guideposts Magazine and The Lutheran all use true
personal experience pieces. Confession magazines such as Black Secrets and
True Love are always on the lookout for fictionalized versions of personal
experiences.
So, can you write and sell your personal experiences? Sure you can.
Here's how.
Know Where to Begin
A tight structure is imperative for this type of article. Your focus
must be strong. Once you've chosen the incident you want to write about,
your first step is to pick out the point or theme you want to prove with
your piece, and everything in your article must build to prove this point.
"Crime doesn't pay" is too broad a theme for a personal experience piece.
If, however, you are able to narrow that theme to "My ex-husband kidnapped
our young daughter, and my faith in the justice system prevailed because he
was sent to jail when he was caught," this would be a good focus and would
make an excellent personal experience article.
So what is the formula for writing one of these pieces? I find the
following structure works well for a wide variety of these types of
articles.
A personal experience story always starts on the day that something
different happens to you (the "I" character of your story if you're writing
in the first person, or the viewpoint character if you are telling someone
else's story.) This incident becomes your "hook" because you use it to hook
or capture the reader's interest.
Strive to make the hook provocative enough that the reader wants to
know what will happen to the viewpoint character. A shocking statement works
well as a personal experience hook ("I didn't think it would feel so good to
pull the trigger and watch my target lurch and fall to the ground.") Or an
anecdote that leaves a question in the reader's mind ("When I was ten and
snooping through her dresser drawer, I found out my mother wasn't a woman at
all.")
Because of this incident or situation, you or your focus character has
to react and decide how to handle the problem. Usually, this decision will
be wrong and will cause your main character stress and suffering. He's
chosen this path, however, for a reason that seems right to him.
The viewpoint character continues on the course charted by this
decision until something happens to change his attitude. A dark moment or
turning point forces him to make a sacrifice or some sort of choice which
shows he has learned his lesson and can continue to a satisfactory
conclusion to the original problem. A definite theme emerges through the
telling of the story. As long as your viewpoint character learns something
about himself or changes in some way, your story has done its job.
Putting it in Practice: A Case Study
Confused? Don't be. Let's take this one step at a time with an example
from a recently-published article.
1) The Problem or Original Conflict (Your Hook). Your story or article
always opens with an occurrence of some sort which forces your main
character to make a decision. She's sailing along in life and suddenly, a
problem pops up. This is where you start your piece (and not a moment
sooner.) For example, let's look at the September, 1999, issue of Ladies'
Home Journal "Can This Marriage Be Saved" column by Andrea Warren. The focus
character, Rita, has remarried after her beloved husband, the father of her
two young children, was killed in the line of duty. Her problem is the fact
that she can't forget her first husband. The hook to the piece is a direct
quote, which makes the reader want to keep reading to find out how she
solves her problem. ("Ken doesn't know this, but lately I've been visiting
the cemetery where my first husband is buried.")
2) The Reaction or Bad Decision. Your focus character reacts to the
problem in a way that moves the story along and extends the tension. She
makes a bad choice of actions. Rita's wrong decision is to overindulge her
children, and when Ken, her new husband, tries to discipline them, she takes
their sides against their stepfather. This renders him lower in the new
family's hierarchy than he should be. The reader may at first see the folly
of her ways and question why she has reacted this way, but he will
understand why she does it once he learns what has motivated her to do it.
3) Motivation. This is the reason your character made the bad choice she
made. Rita's motivation, told in a flashback, tells the story of how her
first husband was killed in the line of duty. Because of the grief she still
suffers over the loss, she has become a pushover with her kids and lets them
get away with more than they should. She still sees her first marriage and
family as the main relationship in her life, and her second husband as just
that--secondary. Motivation is often slipped into the personal experience
piece by way of a flashback, as in our example, which tells the character's
back story, pointing to why she made the choice she made. It's also
acceptable to weave the motivation in by means of introspection -- the
character's inner thoughts -- as long as these thoughts are kept short and don't break up the flow of the narrative.
4) The Body of the Story. Build your article with events that have been
put into motion because of your main character's original choice. Be sure to
include only things that have direct bearing on the story at hand. Don't bog
down the piece with incidentals such as what the focus character had for
breakfast last Tuesday unless that menu in some way contributes to the
outcome of the piece. The body of Rita's story tells about the bitter
arguments that ensue over the discipline of the children when her new
husband arrives on the scene.
5) The Dark Moment or Crisis. Your focus character can't go on living
with this choice he's made because if he does, we have no story and he can't
learn or change from his original (wrong) decision. So, a crisis occurs.
Rita's crisis occurs when Ken begins to withdraw from the family unit
and Rita stands to lose him.
6) Sacrifice or Reactive Choice. Your focus character must make some
sort of sacrifice or choice in order to learn her lesson and make a change.
Rita's sacrifice is to see a marriage counselor, and her choice is to follow
the counselor's advice of putting her new husband above her children in the
family dynamic.
7) Satisfactory Ending. Note, I didn't say happy ending because the
conclusion of your personal experience piece doesn't necessarily have to be
happy. It needs only be the right ending for the particular situation. If
you or your viewpoint character's bad decision was something horrible like
robbing a bank or injuring another person, you/she probably doesn't deserve
to live happily ever after. Your ending must reflect that while you have
suffered and learned this life lesson, that may not exonerate you from
suffering further consequences in your life. The satisfactory ending in our
sample piece shows Rita's and Ken's attempts at making time for each other
and building strength as a couple. In the Ladies' Home Journal example, the
second part of the story is also told from Ken's point of view, showing his
problem, reaction, motivation, etc.
8) Theme. After you've drafted your personal experience piece, go back
over it to check to see if you've developed the theme you set out to
develop. If you've gone off on other tangents, rework the piece to eliminate
them. For a tight personal experience piece, only one theme should dominate.
So, there's one basic structure of the modern-day personal experience
piece. F. Scott Fitzgerald said, "A writer wastes nothing." Don't waste your
personal experiences. Look into your own life or the life of someone close
to you for personal experiences and write about them. The market is hungry
for these types of articles. Make them work for you.
Copyright © 1999 Deborah Newton
This article is now a chapter
in The Writer's Handbook 2001.
Deb Newton's credits
include more than 350 short stories and articles for such publications
as The Writer, Whispers From Heaven, Byline Magazine, Northeast
Outdoors, Camping & RV Magazine, National Neighborhood News,
W3Health-and-Wellness.com, FolksOnline.com, True Story, Jive,
American Trucker, Teen.com, Big Apple Parent, and many others. For more writing tips, visit her website.
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