Online cursus persoonlijk essay schrijven is meteen leuk. Veel leeswerk.

– Shitty First Drafts. Anne Lamott.
– Picturing the Personal Essay: A Visual Guide. Tim Bascom.
– Carpet is Mungers. Meghan Daum.
– My Relapse Years. Sarah Hepola.
– One Night Stand Life. Elizabeth Wurtzel.
– On Housesitting. Brian Blanchfield.

Afgelopen drie dagen shitty first draft geschreven, shitty first drafts van medecursisten druppelen nu binnen. Vrouw bivakkeert in haar eentje in een bus, op zoek naar de vrijheid van de bergen. Ik ga die vrouw in Noord Amerika opzoeken. Ik lig al in haar bus, met de deur op een kier, kijkend naar de sterren, als een agent met zijn zaklamp naar binnen schijnt.

Anne Lamott
Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. […] Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft — you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft — you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

Tim Bascom
Writer’s block is not their [= the essayist’s] problem since their minds overflow with remembered experiences and related ideas. While a fiction writer may need to invent from scratch, adding and adding, the essayist usually needs to do the opposite, deleting and deleting. As a result, nonfiction creativity is best demonstrated by what has been left out. […] What appears in the written ‘picture’, like any good painting, has wholeness because the essayist was disciplined enough to remove everything else.

Meghan Daum
Mijn god, dit essay doet me schamen voor mijn tapijt in de slaapkamer.

Elizabeth Wurtzel
I made a career out of my emotions. […] I am fortunate to have been well paid for an almost pathological honesty. Ik zou dit essay kunnen overtypen.

Sarah Hepola, Brian Blanchfield
Ik voel deze essays niet. Wat beangstigend is. Bevrijdend.

Chloe Caldwell
‘You might think you’re writing about how your father wronged you, and you think you can’t do that, so you don’t even try. I can’t, you say, It would hurt my family. But until you actually sit with the page and stare at the wall every day for four hours, you don’t know what this story is about. It could be about forgiveness. It could be about your reckless teenage years. Saying you can’t do it because it will hurt someone is a cop out.’

‘So how do we do this? By focusing on details and feelings. By being anti-heros. By being generous with our flaws. We have to transcend ourselves. Get over ourselves. Writing hyper-personal essays is a shedding of the ego. We’re all here sharing this space on earth, for connection. The personal essay is what intimacy is all about. We want to write in a way that let’s the reader color in his/her own lines, see his/her OWN experiences through YOUR experiences. We want them to feel less alone in the world.’

Verder met Chloe Caldwell googelen.

Op de koopknop gedrukt.