Some Tips for Writing an Essay by New York Times ‘Modern Love’ Editor

Remember Why People Read Stories

Nearly 25 years ago I was sitting in a writing workshop in Tucson, Arizona with a bunch of other aspiring writers, most of us in our mid-20s. The teacher was a man name Rust Hills who had been fiction editor at Esquire for decades.

One day Rust began class by asking, “Why do we read stories anyway?”

We muttered a few responses about appreciating “language” and “technique.” We thought of stories as things that were mostly concerned with style. And also we wanted to sound smart, which we weren’t.

Finally he said, a little exasperated: “Don’t we read stories because we want to find out what happens?”

Yes. That’s why we read stories.

Don’t underestimate the power of a reader’s curiosity, whether you’re writing a short story or a personal essay. Too often people give everything away at the start. In newspaper articles, you’re supposed to put all the important information at the top, right?

Not in this kind of newspaper story. It needs to unfold in a dramatic arc, with mystery and surprise. If the surprise in your story is the fact that your unlikely relationship led to marriage, don’t say in the first line: “I met my future wife at cocktail party…”

In the same vein, don’t give away the surprises in your essay in your cover note. An editor should be able to read without spoilers just as a reader gets to. You’d be amazed how many people squash all the intrigue by blabbering out all the good stuff first.

Be generous with the reader… but GRADUALLY.

Don’t Always Begin at the Beginning

I receive a lot of essays that open with some form of the following: “I first met Joe when we were both 19…” Or “The first time I saw Danielle…” Or “Bob and I met when we…” In other words, they begin at the beginning. Although doing so may be a natural part of the writing process, it can make for a plodding and overly familiar opening to an essay.

As part of your revision process, try starting your essay a little later, in the midst of dialogue or events. Sometimes it’s more intriguing for us to be dropped into the action than to receive all the background information up front. Maybe your “how we met” line (or its equivalent) can wait until the start of the 3rd paragraph, or the 7th, when we’re already hooked. Or maybe you don’t need it at all.

One cautionary note: There can be a fine line between intrigue and confusion. A confused reader will want to stop reading. An intrigued reader will want to know more. So you’ll still need to begin your essay clearly and directly. Just ask yourself if you really need to begin it at the beginning.

The Case of The Pretty Good Essay

A couple of months ago I was on a panel with editors from The New Yorker, Harper’s, Electric Literature, and Tin House speaking before an audience of literary agents. One agent asked what was the hardest thing about dealing with a lot of slush pile submissions, the premise being that slogging through so much bad writing is hard.

I knew what my answer was, but I was surprised to hear my fellow panelists all answer more or less the same way. When you are an editor slogging through submissions, bad writing is a gift, a relief! With bad writing, you can stop reading quickly and move on and your endless pile is reduced by one. No, the most difficult task for us is the “pretty good” essay, an essay (or short story) that’s generally well-written, probably publishable, has some spark, a semi-engaging voice, is well targeted at the publication, and yet – still doesn’t win you over.

You read the whole thing once. You read it again later. There’s really nothing “wrong” with it, nothing you could explain. There’s simply not enough right.

In the early years of the column I got a high percentage of bad writing. Now I get very little. What I get instead are a lot of pretty good essays.

In many cases, the pretty good essay is stopped from being more by an ending that fails to boost it to another level. The ending is where a writer’s thinking and understanding and level of sophistication comes to full bloom. The ending is where the emotional impact remains flat or fizzles or soars. The ending, when done well, can feel simultaneously inevitable and surprising.

It’s not easy. It can take more effort to write a pretty good essay than to write a spectacular one. There are no secrets. There is just the work and keeping at it.

Give Your Story Its Best Shot

In many submissions I receive, mistakes caused by impatience can hurt a writer’s chances. The editor wants to think this is your best story, not one of 20 essays you’ve dashed off and sent out to dozens of outlets all at once. I sigh when I read some version of this in a cover note:

“I got really inspired and wrote this in a few hours today and am eager to hear what you think.”

Or:

“If you don’t like this one, I’ve got plenty more where it came from.”

Sometimes I’ll pass on a submission but convey that I saw promise, and if the writer would address X, Y, and Z I’d be happy to take another look. Then the revision comes sailing back within hours, or the next day, or two days later. I suspect writers feel they need to get it back while the story is still on the editor’s mind, but that’s a mistake. The editor doesn’t want to see it back so soon, and, fair or not, he’ll think you rushed it and won’t view the revision optimistically.

I once turned away a promising essay with a few suggestions for improvement, and the writer didn’t send it back until seven months later, having reworked the piece many times during that stretch. And it was a gem. I hardly had to change a word. That’s a writer with patience. That’s a writer to take seriously because he takes himself seriously.

People also jump the gun by submitting an essay prematurely, returning to it, and then sending a new version (or two, or three!) in the days or weeks that follow, explaining that this draft is much better. No, wait, this one is. Hang on – now I’ve really nailed it!

In terms of rush jobs, I regularly get submissions addressed to “Modern Lives” and to “the Modern Love column in the NYT Magazine” (it’s in Sunday Styles). People also ask that I “feel free to share the essay with colleagues in other departments at the paper” as if they don’t really know where it might fit, but maybe I might?

These are hardly disqualifying mistakes, but they show a lack of focus and professionalism that doesn’t bode well. The submission feels random and scattershot from the start.

Of course, the best way to approach Modern Love or any other venue is to case it out, to read as much of it as you can, to see what others have done, to get familiar with what the parameters are and how far they can be stretched. To not rush your submission. To know the basics.

For the basics of how to submit and for the archive of columns, visit the Modern Love index page at:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/style/fashionandstyle/columns/modernlove/index.html

If you prefer to do your reading in book form, check out the Modern Love anthology, in paperback or Kindle. Good luck. I appreciate the time and effort people put into these submissions and lament that 99% of the time I have to say no. It’s easy to say no to rush jobs. So take your time and make it harder.

Love Well, Write Well

It occurred to me (in working on a book I’m writing) that the qualities of a successful personal essay are the same as those exhibited by people who tend to have successful relationships (which isn’t the same thing as saying that good writers have good relationships- if only!). Likewise, the flaws of each are the same. This is just a start. Any others?

Good qualities for both essays and relationships:

• Honest
• Generous
• Open-minded
• Curious
• Expansive
• Funny
• Self-deprecating

Bad qualities for both essays and relationships:

• Dishonest
• Withholding
• Blaming
• Secretive
• Petty
• Dismissive
• Egotistical

Professionalism Counts

As a longtime writer myself, I’m well acquainted with the disappointment writers can feel when an essay or story they’ve put a lot of time and effort into gets turned down. But in my experience it’s even more dispiriting when you don’t hear back at all.

With this column I have considered it important to respond to all writers with at least a standard note within a reasonable amount of time (3 – 6 weeks). I hope I can continue to do so. Right now the volume of submissions is just at the edge of what I can manage. I think writers deserve to hear back, but my motivation is also selfish: I worry that if writers think they’re sending their work into a black hole, they won’t trust the process, and if they don’t trust the process, they’ll stop participating in it.

Unfortunately, I can’t offer editorial feedback as part of my response unless the piece is a fit or a near fit. Some people write back to say they were hoping to hear a reason. Just one line! Although it may seem like providing a line or two would be fast and easy, it really isn’t. The reasons a piece may not be right are often hard to pinpoint, and trying to dash off some excuse can actually be more harmful than helpful to a writer, magnifying a minor shortcoming when the issue is something more nuanced and complicated.

Over the years I’ve found that writers who submit to Modern Love are overwhelmingly grateful for the notice and gracious if they choose to respond. Unfortunately, the ease of email also spurs a few to vent their disappointment. Several times a month I field responses like these:

“Oh, well. Your loss.”

“Lame!”

“I think your choice is a foolish one. Your past submissions decisions have proven as much, and my career will further reveal this truth to you.”

Sigh. I wish these writers had thought twice (or three times!) before firing off such self-sabotaging notes. For me (and surely for other editors of personal essay columns), the real red flag of the venting email is that editing and publishing confessional essays for a large audience is not for the thin-skinned and volatile. So even if a writer’s essay was promising, which in several of these cases it was, when we editors get a note like that we think: Well, better to learn this now than later.

Writing counts. But so does professionalism. A lot.

Dealing With Writer’s Block

For the past year or so I’ve been working on a book. But with my job and other commitments I can’t work on it for days (often weeks) at a time. When I’m finally able to get back to it, the writing almost always goes badly. It feels forced, and it is forced. For days the process can feel this way, like I’m wasting my time. And like most of you, I don’t have any time to waste. If I’m going to carve out a day or two to write and fall behind on all my other work and responsibilities, I’ve got to be able to write well during that time. And if I’m not writing well, I feel like I should get up and go do something else, something more productive.

That attitude, for me, is the definition of writer’s block: being too impatient to waste time writing badly. You have to write badly to write well. And you have to sit with the bad writing and write more of it and then sit with that until eventually you start writing well. As my old friend Ron Carlson says, “Whatever you do, stay in the room.”

Writer’s block isn’t a lack of something to say. It’s a lack of patience with figuring out how to say it. So stay in the room. Write badly. It is productive. You just might not know it yet.

Clarity, clarity, clarity

An editor who was helping me read submissions not long ago sent along a note with one essay that said: “I can’t figure out what happens at the end of this piece. If you can, let me know.”

A reader should never, ever have to say that about your essay.

If the mantra of the real-estate agent is “location, location, location,” the mantra of the newspaper editor is “clarity, clarity, clarity.” Some writers seem to believe that complexity of language suggests complexity of thought. But often the more complicated your ideas are, the more they need to be conveyed in clear and simple terms.

Other writers may think a little confusion, in terms of what’s happening in the story, is intriguing; after all, you don’t want to underestimate the intelligence of your reader. True. But you want that intelligent reader to be wrestling with your ideas, not trying to figure out your story’s chronology.

Sometimes, of course, a writer has put his energy into gussying up the writing to compensate for the fact that not much is actually going on in the story. He doesn’t have much to say, but he has style! Writing that’s high on style and voice can be like a tap dance routine that’s trying to slide by on entertainment value alone. I’m not saying that can’t succeed. I’m as big a fan of a beautifully constructed sentence as anyone. But readers tend to be more appreciative of a good story.

I’m also not saying that writing clearly is the same as writing easily. Nothing is more irritating that being told, “You’ve just got to get out of the way and let the story tell itself.”

If only! Clear writing is usually the result of more work, not less. It’s the result of writing, getting feedback, revising, getting more feedback, and revising again until you’ve worn away all the prancing and preening and your story is as smooth and durable as a train rail, delivering the goods.

Writing About Other People

Writers worry, justifiably, about dragging other people into their essays and maybe unfairly passing judgment on them, misrepresenting them, and making them angry, sad, or litigious. We obviously live our lives among other people and can’t tell stories about ourselves without them. Although our memories of events and interactions may be different from theirs, we are entitled to our own version as long as we’re not willfully misremembering and misleading.

That said, how do we write about other people in a way that’s honest but fair? Your intent matters. Two intentions that tend to make for poor personal essay writing are the “tribute” and the “prosecution.” In the tribute essay we are trying to glorify someone, often after they have died. So we write about them in glowing terms that may be accurate and feel authentic to us but can be received by the reader as a kind of propaganda.

In the prosecutorial essay we are trying to blame someone for acting badly or hurting us or ruining our relationship, and this can make readers feel like they’re serving on a jury for a trial that has no defense attorney. The more the prosecutor hammers away without rebuttal, the more the jury, aware of the unfairness of the proceeding, starts to think, “Not guilty.”

As the writer, you are in a position of great power—you control the megaphone—and the reader knows this. You can make people look good or bad. And if the reader senses you’re abusing this power, they’ll think the person who looks worse is you. This is why, as a preemptive measure, the writer should be hardest on himself. Self-deprecation can be among the personal essayist’s most useful tools. Counter-intuitively, you can look good by looking bad.

The other tool that can help is self-effacement—“stepping aside” in the essay to let scenes, dialogue, and concrete details carry the freight for a while. There is an urge in personal essay writing to always be front and center, controlling the narrative through summary and explanation like a tour guide who never shuts up. But this controlling voice can sound more judgmental and unfair than a scene that, while still composed by the writer, will probably feel more transparent to the reader. Often I find myself saying to writers: “This is where we could use a scene.” This is particularly true in the second half of an essay, where we’re already oriented and want our tour guide to keep quiet so we can see this world for what it is and judge for ourselves.

Last Proof

In editing essays, I often find myself cutting the same words or correcting the same mistakes. Some of these mistakes afflict writing in general while others seem more specific to the column. A few are matters of Times style (how the newspaper decides usage or appearance). In any case, these are things to look for in your last proof before sending off your essay. Nearly everyone stumbles over these kinds of issues, so no judgement, okay? (I mean “judgment.”)

– How many times can you remove “that”? (I’ll bet a lot.)

– How many adverbs can you do without? (Try cutting half of them, at least.)

– Did you call it “Sex and the City” or “Sex in the City”? (It’s “and.”)

– In describing the lighting, did you spell it “fluorescent” or “flourescent” or “florescent”? (It’s the first.)

– Did you say, “He invited John and I”? (It’s “me.”)

– Did you use “Fast forward 10 years…” as a transition to move the essay ahead in time? (It has become overused.)

– Use “all right,” not “alright.”

– Change any words or phrases that are in ALL CAPS or italics to some other means of emphasis. (Only rarely will either be used in the body of an article in the paper.)

– Did you use profanity? (You’ll have to remove or replace.)

– Don’t agonize over a title. (In almost every case it will be written by the copy desk.)

– How many exclamation points do you really need? (Not many.)

– How many spaces do you have after a period at the end of a sentence? (Should be one, not two.)

– You can probably find better adjectives than “amazing,” “incredible,” “fantastic,” “terrible,” “horrible,” or “very bad” (even if you’re having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day).

 When Not To Submit

When you have just churned out a draft of a fantastic essay, it feels great, right? You imagine readers being so impressed and loving you. You entertain thoughts of fame and fortune, or at least a high-profile byline. You anticipate everyone sending you notes of admiration on Facebook and Twitter, even people who don’t know you. You’ve said everything you want to say in exactly the way you want to say it. You can’t imagine being able to say it any better.

This is not the time to submit your essay.

Savor the moment, and then let it pass. Set the essay aside and come back to it a few days or weeks later. Try to read it when you’re really busy. Does the high return? Or does reading it now, when you’re feeling tired and cranky and worthless, make you think your essay might actually be kind of…bad? Or at least not good. (Bad enough that you now anticipate friends and strangers ridiculing you on Facebook and Twitter.)

To write, you need both a huge ego and a beaten-down ego. The huge ego allows you power through a first draft and believe that people are dying to read what you have to say. The beaten-down ego makes you return to the draft later and wonder why anyone would want to read such drivel. So you rework it until you get that high feeling back. Then the high fades again. And you repeat this series of highs and lows several times.

Until finally you show the essay to someone else. If they’re effusive, be skeptical. If they’re critical, be skeptical. Take some of their advice but not all of it. Think: Well, I may not know everything, but neither do you.

In the end, you have a piece of writing. You no longer think it’s the best thing ever written. You no longer think it’s the worst thing ever written. It would be nice if editors and readers admired it, but you’d understand if they didn’t.

Time to send it off and find out.

Certainty vs. Doubt

Throughout our education we are asked to prove things in our writing, to come up with a thesis and support it with evidence. We think we need to be sound like an expert, and if we don’t we worry our essay might fall apart. If we feel doubt or ambivalence creeping in, we try to shove it aside. Certainty feels like strength. Doubt feels like weakness. Ambivalence just feels wishy-washy.

Later we may try our hand at writing fiction and personal essays. Following what we’ve learned in school, we once again set out to prove something in our writing. Maybe we’re trying to show that we were right and someone else was wrong in what happened between us. We try to sound certain. We’re supposed to be in charge of this essay, so if we feel any doubt or ambivalence creeping in, we once again shove it aside.

Yet what is our goal in writing a personal essay? Are we trying to prove something, or are we trying to understand something? Because if we’re trying to understand something, our voice of certainty can start to sound narrow and simplistic, whereas our voice of doubt and ambivalence can start to sound intelligent, humble, and empathetic. Certainty has become weakness, and doubt has become strength.

Granted, your essay still needs to make a point. Doubt and ambivalence should not be used as an excuse for lazy thinking or writing that goes nowhere. The distinction I’m talking about was perhaps best made way back in 1888, when the master short story writer Anton Chekov wrote in a letter to a friend: “You are right in demanding that an artist approach his work consciously, but you are confusing two concepts: the solution of a problem and the correct formulation of a problem. Only the second is required of the artist.”

The best essays I see do not attempt to “solve” life. They try to come up with the correct formulation of life’s problems. I try to remember that advice every time I write.

Find New Friends?

My friend and former writing teacher Ron Carlson once said, “If your friends don’t like your writing, find new friends.”

Easier said than done, perhaps, but his point is well taken. Writing can feel lonely, unrewarding, and futile even under the best circumstances; it can’t help to surround yourself with people who don’t get what you’re doing and don’t care.

People often disparage writing workshops and graduate writing programs by saying: “Writing can’t be taught.” To which I say: “Who cares if writing can or can’t be taught?” What aspiring writers need more than anything is a community of people who think writing is important, who will argue about comma placement, who will make you think that what you’re doing is worthwhile.

In this vein, I appreciate the work Susan Shapiro does at The New School in Manhattan, where she has been teaching writing for many years, specializing in the short, personal essay. Her students are enthusiastic and serious about writing. They cheer each other on. Sue cheers them all on. And they publish like mad.

Independent workshops like Grub Street in Boston and the Gotham Writers’ Workshop in New York are great ways to get a weekly jolt of enthusiasm to counteract the looks of pity you might receive from friends and family when you talk about your writing. Similar programs exist in cities and towns nationwide, as well as in universities and colleges large and small.

When you have a job, a family, and a daily grind of responsibilities, a regular writing workshop can be the one thing that keeps you going. You don’t need a teacher with star power or a program full of prizewinners. Mostly what you need are the same two things all writers need, no matter how accomplished: someone to give you a deadline, and the expectation that just two or three people out there are eager to read what you’ve written.

Issues of Voice

Occasionally when working with a writer I will make changes for clarity, length, or to avoid repetition (the usual reasons), and the next day the essay will come back to me with many of my edits reverted to the original wording because, as the writer explains, “It didn’t sound right,” or “It didn’t sound like me.”

I am equally guilty of behaving this way when being edited, and so is anyone who works really hard at his or her writing. In our finicky perfectionism, we go over the thing so many times that the words and sentences start to form a kind of song in our heads, and it’s jarring when the notes are then rearranged or a few of them are taken out. It sounds completely wrong. Wait a minute, we think. That’s not my song!

While it’s commendable to be this dedicated and polished about one’s writing, it also can be constricting. Changes feel like violations not because they’re bad changes but because our brain is still anticipating the old pattern. We’re caught in a stylistic rut, and that rut is elevating style over substance. We’re enjoying the melody so much that we’ve grown a little fuzzy headed about what we’re actually saying.

Not to suggest that an editor’s changes are always right – not at all. Editors also can bring their own voices to the process, and they too can get lost in style over substance when making their edits, in which case you may just be trading your style for theirs. One of the best services a good editor can provide, though, is to pull you out of your stylistic rut by messing with your rhythms and getting you to approach your own writing with a new eye and ear.

Revision, after all, is about “re-seeing.” And it’s hard to “re-see” when your ears keep hearing the same old tune.

Where Is The Air?

A personal essay needs to have a feeling of space and possibility. It needs air—open windows and doors and access points so readers can find a way in and understand and be moved. When a story feels closed off and airless, the reader loses interest and wanders away.

Writers can either open up or close off their stories in all kinds of ways. Here are three.

Visually

Sometimes I flip through the pages of an essay and know it isn’t going to let me in. The whole thing looks impenetrable: big blocky paragraphs, two or three per page, that never give way to scenes or dialogue. Too often these essays turn out to be all tell and no show, relying mostly on summary to cram a big story into a small space. Where is the air? How are we to see and hear and feel and discover? We can’t.

Stylistically

Some writers rely on a voice that is heavy with stylistic tics or mannerisms, and this voice can become a kind of performance that keeps readers from engaging with what’s really happening in the story. I want to say to such writers: Don’t try so hard to impress with language. Let your story emerge. A few well-turned phrases, apt metaphors or sly jokes can entice, but too many start to form a stylistic wall. Never underestimate the power of simple language to tell a powerful story.

Emotionally

A personal essay can reveal how the writer was feeling as he or she was writing it. If you’re feeling angry or bitter, your writing will probably exude blame and self-pity. If you’re upset and grieving, your writing may become weighed down by sentiment. If you’re feeling especially smart, your writing may condescend. But if you’re feeling curious, and if you allow that curiosity to drive the narrative, then your writing is likely to brim with a sense of mystery, possibility and discovery.

You’re asking yourself: Why did this happen? And what is it going to mean?

These are questions readers want to explore with you, because readers are curious too. They read to discover. If you are their agent of discovery, they will follow you anywhere.