The word comes from Montaigne, who called his pieces essais — attempts, trials, efforts at something. It is the most useful fact about the form, and the one most often forgotten by people writing them. An essay is not a small memoir and it is not a confession. It is a record of somebody thinking, in public, about something they have not finished thinking about.
That distinction sounds academic until you notice how much bad personal writing it explains. A piece that begins with a settled conclusion and assembles anecdotes to support it is not an attempt at anything; it is an argument with an illustrated cover. Readers can feel the difference immediately, even if what they say is only that it seemed a bit flat.
What separates an essay from a chapter
A memoir chapter belongs to a longer arc and can afford to advance it slowly. An essay has no arc to lean on. It has to justify its own existence in a few thousand words, which means it needs a question and a movement.
The question does not have to be announced. It usually should not be. But it has to be there, and it has to be genuinely open to the writer. Why do I keep going back to that city. What was actually happening in that argument. Why does this piece of music undo me. If you can answer it in a sentence before you start, you have a paragraph rather than an essay.
The movement is the other requirement. An essay must end somewhere its opening could not have predicted. Not necessarily a resolution — frequently the ending is a reframing of the question, or the discovery that it was the wrong question — but the reader has to arrive somewhere. A piece that circles the same insight for three thousand words has described a subject without having thought about it.
The braid
The single most reliable structural move in the form is to put the personal material against something that is not personal, and let the two comment on each other.
James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" is the canonical demonstration. It holds his father's funeral, the day of his own birth-adjacent grief and rage, and the Harlem riot of 1943 in the same frame, and the essay's power comes from refusing to explain the connection between the private and public disasters while making it impossible to miss. Neither strand would be as strong alone. The father's death without the city burning would be grief; the riot without the funeral would be reportage.
The mechanism is available at much smaller scale. An essay about a divorce braided with the history of the building you moved into. An essay about a parent's illness braided with how the disease is actually described in the literature. An essay about leaving a country braided with the specifics of a visa process. What the second strand does is give the reader somewhere to rest, supply a vocabulary the personal material can borrow, and — most importantly — protect the piece from the closed loop of a self examining only itself.
Zadie Smith's "Joy" does something like this by taking an apparently philosophical question about the difference between pleasure and joy and testing it against a small number of extremely specific personal instances. The abstraction keeps the memoir from becoming anecdote; the memoir keeps the abstraction from becoming a seminar.
Segmentation is allowed
The other structural liberty essays permit, and novels generally do not, is the white space.
A segmented essay — numbered sections, or simply breaks — can move between times, registers and subjects without transitional machinery. The reader accepts the jump because the form has told them to expect it, and the meaning arrives from the juxtaposition rather than from the connective tissue.
This is enormously useful and it is also the easiest technique to abuse. Segmentation cannot rescue material that has no relationship; it only works when the reader can feel that the sections are converging on something. If the breaks are there because you could not work out how to get from one part to the next, the reader will know.
What went wrong with the confessional essay
There was a period in the 2010s when the personal essay was extremely easy to publish online, and the easiest kind to place was the one with the most exposure in it. Editors commissioned the worst thing that had ever happened to a writer, frequently paid very little for it, and put a headline on it that the writer had not chosen. Jia Tolentino wrote the obituary for this arrangement in The New Yorker, arguing that the market for the first-person confessional had collapsed under its own incentives.
The lesson is not that vulnerability is bad. It is that vulnerability is not by itself a subject. An essay in which something terrible is disclosed and nothing is thought about it has traded the writer's privacy for the reader's attention and returned nothing to either party.
The practical test I would apply before sending anything: is the most painful material in here doing structural work, or is it doing the work of making the piece feel important? And a second, more selfish one: am I going to be comfortable with this being permanently attached to my name and searchable, because it will be.
Writing the thing
A few habits that seem to help, offered without any claim that they are the only way.
Start from the question, not the anecdote. Most drafts start with a scene because scenes are easier to write, and then spend two pages looking for a reason to have told it.
Write past the point where you know what you are saying. The good material in an essay tends to arrive after the writer has exhausted their prepared thoughts, which is an argument for drafting long and cutting hard.
Cut the first page. It is nearly always throat-clearing. The real opening is usually the third or fourth paragraph, where you stopped introducing and started writing.
Read it aloud at the end, because the essay is a spoken form in disguise — its whole register is somebody talking to you — and the sentence that trips your own tongue will trip a reader's eye.
Where they go
Short personal essays are published in literary magazines, in the essay sections of general-interest publications, and increasingly in writers' own newsletters. The first pays in prestige and occasionally a small fee; the second pays and is extremely competitive; the third pays nothing initially and gives you complete control, which for some writers is the better trade.
Submitting works much like any literary submission: read several issues of anything before you send to it, follow the guidelines precisely, expect simultaneous submissions to be either permitted or forbidden and check which, and treat rejection as the ordinary weather of the activity.
At some point a writer with enough essays starts thinking about a collection. Trade publishers do publish essay collections, usually from writers with an established body of published pieces, and independent presses do so more readily. Self-publishing a collection is also entirely reasonable, particularly for work aimed at a specific readership you can already reach — just go and read the platform's own current terms rather than trusting any article's summary of them. Amazon's KDP, for instance, publishes its royalty options and the price bands they apply to, and those terms change often enough that any figure quoted secondhand should be checked at source.
None of that is the reason to write essays. The reason is narrower and better: it is the only form I know that rewards you for not having made your mind up, and there is not much else in writing or in life that does.
Tags
Taresh Sharan
support@sharaninitiatives.com