Nancy Slonim Aronie Shares Great Stories and 'Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay'

Author and founder of the Chilmark Writing Workshop on Martha’s Vineyard, Nancy Slonim Aronie, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her third book, a guide to writing short personal essays, titled Seven Secrets to the Perfect Personal Essay: Crafting the Story Only You Can Write. In her book, readers can find insightful advice, prompts, examples of personal essays and more, of how to create a captivating narrative of one’s life story. For Aronie, her definition of a personal essay is, “It’s your take, it’s your perspective. It’s your story. It’s honest, it happened. It’s not fiction, you’re not making stuff up and it can never be wrong because it’s your experience. Now, somebody else is going to hear that story and they were a part of it and go, ‘That’s not how it happened,’ but they have no right to say that’s not how it happened because it’s your take on it. It’s how you felt. How you feel is the truth of how you feel. Facts are not part of it necessarily. This is how it felt to me at the time… it’s mostly about the emotional truth and that’s what you’re looking for.”

As far as what writers can do to create the perfect personal essay, Aronie believes vulnerability is the key. “I have to know that your broken heart is just like my broken heart. Your story is going to be different from mine, but I want to be able to relate to it. Your details are going to be different, but I also want to know that we have experienced what it feels like to be absolutely at the bottom and thinking, ‘What am I doing here? How can I manage?’…It’s not like a journal entry, it’s a complete, this is what I went from here to here, so you are giving a bit of a map of, you can make it, you can do this…” While personal essays can often be serious, Aronie says that funny anecdotes can be included as well, but in a mindful way. “You can write funny stuff, but I still have to know who’s in there. I can’t just have it be light-weight. There’s got to be something that transformed you. The transformation is what we want.” And finally, “Just tell the story as if you were talking to your best friend who didn’t know you, who didn’t know anything about you and this is what happened and you just start talking and it will flow out of you. Just don’t worry about structure and don’t try to sound like a writer, sound like you. Use your language, your rhythms, and tell your story from your gut and your heart.”