“Is it conceited to write about oneself?” June Freelancing Diary.

The personal essay and becoming comfortable with a short vision of the future

Dear Reader,

So, developments. I haven’t updated y’all in a while.

First off, check out this article I wrote for Medicinal Media last November. I’m quite proud of it:

Doomscrolling? Set Your Phone to Grayscale.

Illustration by Aaron Sacco.

Now to some news and an editorial.

Is writing about yourself conceited?

A few months ago, I applied to a couple of professional development opportunities. I am happy to report I’ve been accepted to one of them: a one-week multimedia journalism intensive with World Magazine.  

One of the reasons I’m doing this is because I’m not all that interested in writing more stories about me. Personal essays aren’t generally systematic. They usually float to the top of the mind from vivid, sensorial memories, or off-the-cuff ponderings. As someone who writes regularly and frequently, I want to make sure I have regular and frequent material to which I can apply my pen—in other words, I want to do journalism.

This doesn’t mean I think that recounting my own experiences is bad, or (as many assume) conceited. To the contrary. When done right, personal essay writing can teach you to relate to yourself with a healthy mixture of humility and affection that allows you to relate well to others.

Let me walk you through the process. Oftentimes, the first draft reveals how conceited and one-sided your unfiltered thought-patterns can be. (He was a jerk, and I was obviously perfect, and I am such a victim boohoohoo.) In the process of revising for publication, you are forced to confront the fact that self-serving emotional subjectivity is obnoxious to read—and you’ve just produced scads of it. So, you reconsider and rewrite. Often, the story changes in the process. (He might have been a jerk, but I probably wasn’t perfect. What did I do wrong? And have I grown from the experience?) The process of extracting a structured, well-articulated account from subjectivity soup is thus a wonderful exercise in fairness and honesty and a heroic step towards objectivity.

Because of this, personal essays are great practice for other forms of nonfiction writing. Practicing telling your own stories will give you confidence that you can do justice to other people’s. We are usually far more comfortable disappointing ourselves than we are disappointing our friends and colleagues. The personal essay is a technical exercise by which you improve your nonfiction storytelling skills in a low-stakes setting. Then, when you are called upon to accurately and compellingly represent the lives of others, you can pick up your pen with confidence that you’ll do a fair job.

And finally, everything you write will be improved by the ability to sustain a strong first-person perspective. Even if you write in third person, bringing personal stakes into the matter will imbue the topic with a vim and verve that captures the reader’s attention. That’s why, in journalistic profiles, the writer often inserts his own emotional and physical reactions into the story. The reader, by narratively entering the writer’s shoes, is transported into the scene.

To manage your own viewpoint in a way that betrays nobody—neither yourself, nor the reader, nor anyone else—is difficult in a world which more often works in shades of gray than in stark contrasts of black and white. But it is a vital skill, and a skill that is necessary for everyone to cultivate in their relationships in order to keep society civil and just. The world needs more clear-sighted courage, honesty, and humility. The personal essay, handled correctly, is a good place to begin.

What the heck am I doing with freelancing? I don’t know… and I’m trying not to care.

For any beginning writers who know they have a desire and a talent and absolutely no direction, let me comfort you from my incredibly esteemed position of… standing in your very shoes. I also don’t have a clear idea of -what- I want to write. I just compiled a list of my writing on this blog’s About Page, and I had to laugh at the randomness (from “How to Thrift Shop Like A Hot Girl” to “How to Make Sense of The Far Left’s Support of Hamas”). It is random, and at some point, I hope I can concentrate my efforts more narrowly. But I know I won’t make any progress by sitting about and pondering. That’s why this Substack exists. To make me pack my sack and hop on the road. I know that if I do that, eventually I’ll get somewhere.

This no-plan mindset does not come naturally to me, but I’ve found it extremely freeing to simply enjoy the exercise and improvement of my gifts without any expectations of results. I will never forget a sermon delivered in my little Free Methodist Church in college on the famous verse: “Your words are a light unto my feet and a lamp unto my path.” The pastor pointed out that the tallow lamp of David’s day was not at all like a flashlight. It cast no beam. It illuminated one tiny circle about your feet, just enough so you could avoid dangerous cliffs and slippery rocks. Living by faith means being content to focus all one’s attention on that one tiny circle of light, without worrying about what lies a ten feet before or behind.

So, I’m just gonna write what I wanna write. What matters to me. What doesn’t cross my ethical boundaries. What’s fun.

What is that? Science and wellness reporting, for one. It’s so interesting, and I learn many new things. Since it’s not my ideas I’m writing about, it gives my heart and mind a break, allowing me to focus on clarity and style. I also get to meet very interesting people. I have an interest in modern tech developments like VR (I’m no doomer) but also in the hippy, agrarian homesteading movement. It gives me a good “neutral” base for investigating the pros and cons of both worlds.

As for the rest, I like human interest reporting, ghost-writing, investigative journalism—anything that lets me tell true stories about real people. I would love to be able to write about other people with the same intimacy and attention to detail that I bring to my personal essays. I think we are all hungry for different perspectives, not in a dry ideological way, but in a humanly embodied way. Especially as a young adult, I find myself fishing essays not for their arguments but for how-to hints about lived experience. What do other people think is normal, assumed in the rhythms of their day, that I find utterly alien? I am currently co-writing/coaching a personal essay with an international friend who escaped from a cult, and that is a good example of what I have in mind.

Anyhow, enough pondering! I sense I am beginning to veer into the territory of disrespecting the reader with inarticulate processing. This is a public diary after all, and I must keep things to-the-point.

TLDR: I’m taking a journalism course with World News; personal essay writing is great training for other forms of nonfic; I don’t have any plans for where my freelancing career is going; I’m enjoying the ride.

Adieu, and thank you for being here.

Yours,

Amelia