For any piece of writing, for all writers, purpose and audience are crucial considerations. Why are you writing this? What are you trying to say? What does your reader already know? What new information or new way of looking at things are you bringing to your reader?
In a personal essay your material is drawn from your own private experience, but you are writing for a public reader who may well not know you and probably has no particular interest in your trip to DisneyWorld or your car accident or your romantic breakups. You may write journal entries and letters or poems that you don’t share with anyone to help preserve your joys and deal with your pains. But the fact that it happened to you, though reason enough to write it down for yourself, does not necessarily make it a good topic choice for a personal essay.
The personal essayist should consider how his or her individual experience connects to the experience of others. Yes, your readers won’t (generally) have shared your particular experience but they have all dealt with relationships to parents, friends, romantic partners; with feelings of loneliness and disappointment, pride in accomplishment and pleasure in delights of the senses; difficulties of reaching independence and setting one’s moral standards. As you start to consider ideas, to gather memories, to draft an essay, think about what more universal issues are imbedded in your personal experience. By writing about how you dealt with one or more these issues, you invite your readers to connect: to experience vicariously a small portion of someone else’s life and in doing so to examine their own lives.
THE CHOICE OF TOPIC IS A CRUCIAL DECISION FOR A WRITER. It’s important to give yourself time to think about some of the possibilities. That’s your main goal this week, to let your subconscious go to work. I’ll give you some prompts later to get yourself started.
(One other thing to keep in mind as you start to consider subjects: make sure that you choose something that you’re comfortable sharing with others. I have had wonderful essays on abuse and addiction and other very personal topics and readers have been uniformly supportive when classmates have been brave enough to write about such things, but not everyone is willing or able to reveal such painful parts of their lives. As a writer you want to think about choosing subject matter that you care deeply about, questions and puzzles in your life that you want to untangle, but you also need a certain distance on the material to be able to write about it effectively. Please feel free to email me if you want any advice on topic choice. I will ask you at the beginning of next week to post some possibilities you are considering in order to get some classmate feedback as well.)
Added 1/27: Here’s an interesting post with some quotes from memoir writers on Why We Write about Ourselves.