Marina Benjamin on Crafting the Personal Essay
4 minutes read
What makes a personal essay work – as in work emotionally? . . . and with integrity? Pierce your heart and stay with you long after the reading? These questions are very much on my mind as I prepare for my week-long course at the end of August.
Rather than pre-empt the course content here I thought I’d take a step sideways and write about my recent experience commissioning and editing short personal essays for Psyche magazine, the sister magazine to Aeon, where I’ve been an editor for the past decade and where we’ve just launched a ‘Life Stories’ channel.
I’m constantly reading pitches and speculative pieces, second, third and fourth drafts, final drafts and polished ones, and I’ve distilled a set of personal editorial rules of thumb. So, I can very quickly tell you about the kinds of qualities and/or tropes that I am seeing over and over in essays and that I’m NOT interested in commissioning:
- Essays structured around a metaphor (where the metaphor, beautiful though it may be, stands in for story-telling).
- Essays where the author is at a level’s remove, recounting something that happened long ago. Unless the writer adopts the historic present tense.
- Essays where the author emotes – about being in love or pain or sorrow, mistakenly believing that by confessing their emotional turmoil they pull readers close.
- Essays where the insights are too easy, or too thin, or where the writer declares themselves done too soon.
- Essays written with a sense of breathless urgency that simply exhaust the reader.
In my view, much of the skill involved in making a personal essay come alive on the page is to stay close to the ground, making sure that all the internalised reflection is externalised as (for lack of a better word) plot.
Put another way, our Life Stories sing most sweetly when they are written from inside of the experience, when they immerse us in event and place, describing scenes (with incidents and characters and dialogue). When they show as well as tell. When they create narrative tension, because the stakes governing the action that is unfolding are high – and the outcome uncertain. When they feel visceral and embodied, and you’ve no doubt that the writer has felt everything that they describe feeling.
The danger for me is when a personal essay allows self-reflection to take over story to the point where it just feels self-absorbed – and so internal that others can’t grasp where meaning lies or how to find a way in. So many personal essays have a theme without a granular plot and the writer just ends up looping lazily round and round the theme. Stuck in a silo of reflection. It can be engaging for a while, but there’s no propulsion.
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A writer friend of mine likes to say that an essay needs to be ‘about more than it’s about’. She is absolutely right. And what she means is that the takeaway, though derived from and dependent on the sequence of events the essay describes, nonetheless transcends it. You don’t write about it directly, but it motors the entire essay. It’s like a depth charge that detonates in the process of reading and floors the reader.
Who does this well? I can name a few writers who do: Melissa Febos, Alexander Chee, Kai Miller, Leslie Jamison, Rafia Zakaria, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexander Hermon, Zadie Smith. These are just some of the writers who’s work we’ll consider during the course.
Marina Benjamin is the author of a memoir trilogy looking at midlife: The Middlepause (2016) and Insomnia (2018) were widely acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic and have been translated into nine languages. A Little Give (2023) completes the series. Her family memoir Last Days In Babylon (2007) was long-listed for the Wingate Prize; Rocket Dreams (2004) was runner up for the Eugene Emme Award. Her personal essays have been published in Granta, The Paris Review and Aeon as well as in the essay collections Trauma (2021) and The Carbon Arc (2025). Marina is senior editor at Aeon Magazine and a regular tutor of life writing and creative non-fiction. With Heather Dyer, Tina Pepler and Anna Barker, she is a founder of True North – a collective of writers who work with PhD students and early career academics to find and build narrative content in academic writing. She is currently at work on a novel.
In Crafting the Personal Essay, a five-day intensive course taught by Marina Benjamin, you will explore the fascinating world of the personal essay, and learn alongside a group of dedicated writers how to weave personal experience into relatable, impactful stories. The group will be a supportive, nurturing space to explore everything this vibrant genre has to offer.
From the the basics of essay writing – how to find your subject, your angle of entry, your form and your voice – to asking deeper questions of yourself and your material, this course will furnish you with all you need to get started crafting essays. The essay is a form that searches, so you will learn how to interrogate your own premise and reach beyond your essay’s ostensible concerns.
Crafting the Personal Essay starts 25 August. Find out more.
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