Crafting the Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Nonfiction

by Dinty W. Moore

Award winning essayist Scott Russell Sanders once compared the art of essay writing to the pursuit of mental rabbits--a rambling through thickets of thought in search of some brief glimmer of fuzzy truth. While some people persist in the belief that essays are stuffy and antiquated, the truth is that the personal essay is an ever-changing creative medium that provides an ideal vehicle for satisfying the human urge to document truths as we experience them and share them with others--to capture a bit of life on paper.

Crafting the Personal Essay is designed to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay in your own writing. This hands-on, creativity-expanding guide will help you infuse your nonfiction with honesty, personality, and energy. You'll discover:

- An exploration of the basics of essay writing
- Ways to step back and scrutinize your experiences in order to separate out what may be fresh, powerful, surprising or fascinating to a reader
- How to move past private journaling and write for an audience
- How to write eight different types of essays including memoir, travel, humor, and nature essays among others
- Instruction for revision and strategies for getting published
Brimming with helpful examples, exercises, and sample essays, this indispensable guide will help your personal essays transcend the merely private to become powerfully universal.

262 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 2010

About the author

Dinty W. Moore is author of the award-winning memoir Between Panic & Desire, the writing guides The Story Cure and Crafting the Personal Essay, and many other books. He has published essays and stories in The Georgia Review, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, The Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Creative Nonfiction, and elsewhere. He is founding editor of Brevity, the journal of flash nonfiction, and teaches master classes and workshops across the United States as well as in Ireland, Scotland, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, and Mexico.