This is the first of a three-part series I will be making looking at the general structure of strong personal essays. Some of these will be ones I’ve loved and accepted at Hypertext Review. Others are the start of amazing essays that I have taught over the years. I write this post with the intention of fostering discussion and having us consider more deeply the importance of our first few lines. As an Editor and a Reader, I am going through a lot of slush. I want something that captivates me from the first line. Not only that, but the beginning should set me up for what I should be expecting for the rest of the essay.
Let’s look at this first example from “Fuck the Bread. The Bread Is Over” by Sabrina Orah Mark in The Paris Review Daily:
In February, as a plague enters America, I am a finalist for a job I am not offered.
I am brought to campus for a three-day interview. I am shown the library I’ll never have access to, and introduced to students I’ll never teach. I shake hands with faculty I’ll never see again. I describe in great detail the course on fairy tales I’ll never offer. I stand up straight in a simple black-and-white dress. “Don’t say anything strange,” says my mother. “Don’t blather,” she says. “You have a tendency to blather.” I meet with a dean who rubs his face until it reddens, then asks me whether writers even belong in universities. I meet with another dean who asks me the same thing. There are so many deans. I cannot tell the deans apart. Another dean asks me who the babies in my first collection of poems, The Babies, actually are. “We only have a few minutes left,” he adds. “They don’t exist,” I think I say. I am hurrying. “I was writing about voices we’ll never hear,” I think I say. He stands up and shakes my hand. I shake so many hands. I can’t tell if everything is at stake, or nothing is at stake. All I know is that I am being tested, and whether or not I am offered this job will depend on the appetite and mood of strangers. “Your final task,” I imagine the dean saying, “is to make a rope out of these ashes. Do it and the job is yours.”
I love the start of this essay. It’s sharp and to-the-point. We are rooted in space and time (plague in the USA). Not only that, but she decides to write about what will not happen. The job she will not get, the library she’ll never get access to. There’s something different, captivating in this start. Not only that but the writer is also setting us up for the rest of the essay. We understand that this will be about failure. And also about fairytales, her specialty. In fact, there’s a tone that feels akin to that fairytale cadence here. Finally, there’s the mother’s voice, opinionated and curt, cutting through it all. The mother will come in and out of this essay, kind of like the voice of reason amidst all of the events going on.
Here’s another one, “Coyote” by Dayna Copeland in Hypertext Magazine:
Neon green buzz from beyond, 9:51p.m. Mountain time, 11:51p.m. on the East Coast. It was Dad.
“Good Midwest rock from the ’70s, more to come.”
A fragmented text accompanied by a link to a song. I didn’t listen.
Moments later, another text, another song: “14 min. of 1974 bliss.”
Dad only texted me when he was drunk.
Once again, we are rooted in space and time. Not only that, but Copeland goes for staccato sentences. Fragments just like the texts she receives from her father. And the texts, all about music, which we will see as the glue between them. It’s a lovely essay on her complicated relationship with her father. The fact that it starts with their communication through text only emphasizes the strained distance between these two. And then the final line, that he only texted her when drunk, delivers a harsh blow. While it seems nice that he is reaching out, we see that the narrator couches the messages with more information on the dynamic at play.
Here’s one more, “Friends in Reverse Orbit” by Tim Bascom in Hypertext Magazine.
2018: Daniel takes Cathleen and me to the Haudenosaunee reserve near where he and Wendy live in Hamilton, Ontario—to see a replica of a long house, the sort of home whole clans would have lived in back before Europeans showed up. It’s shaped like a loaf of bread but two stories high and shingled with bark. Inside, it smells of wood smoke and cedar. The guide shows us how to make rope from strips of cedar bark, dipping it in water to soften it. All the roof joists are tied with this rope, as are the wooden bunks. And it’s wonderful to think of so many people—maybe thirty or forty—living together here as a unified group. It’s all the more wonderful because it reminds me of the thatched huts Daniel and I would have visited more than fifty years ago, as children on the other side of the globe. Here, like there, the light comes down in thread-like shafts from cracks in the layered shingles. The pinpricks of light, high in the dark ceiling, are like stars glimmering over a little, intimate world—a world shared by only the guide, Daniel, me, and the two gracious women who have yoked their lives to ours, helping us to no longer feel like strangers in a strange land. This is not my history or my place, but I feel unexpectedly at home.
Are we seeing a pattern here? Time and space are quickly and easily lined up? We are in a house of the indigenous peoples of Canada. And the narrator remarks at how it pulls at his memories with Daniel, his friend and guide, who he has known for decades. I love that he starts here, because from here, he goes backwards in time for the rest of the essay. And while we go chronologically backwards, we develop the sense of this deep friendship with Daniel. I also want to note that I really like how the narrator begins in a house, looking at how the structure sheltered a loving community, a great sentiment to start his story.
With all of this, I’d like to mention that we can’t work on a good opening until we’ve written the essay (several times at least) and we’ve gotten an idea of what it’s really about. I know some people can sit down and write the essay that comes to their mind, but I sure can’t. Once you have finessed your essay and you see where it’s going, then it becomes easier to think about the starting point and how you want to bring the reader in.
Excellent information. I will re-read my essays!