Before You Hit Publish, Read This

Are you all reading Rowan’s exceptionally thoughtful Nonfiction Know-How pieces each month? Her posts offer incredibly generous free writing assistance from a high caliber professional writer and editor. In case you haven’t read May’s entry yet, you should pop over here right now and do so. Because this month, she’s written in depth about an issue that plagues bloggers who write, particularly if you write on a weekly basis or more: What’s the difference between a journal entry and an essay, and how can we transform our journal entries into essays suitable for publication?

Sometimes it seems that writers who post often forget that journal musings alone aren’t fit for outside eyes. My favorite line from Rowan’s post? Her definition of the purpose of a journal: “[I]it’s a place to store your writing that isn’t for public consumption.” When writers post often – as blogging almost demands – we sometimes forget this crucial step: taking what was written for our own use and polishing it up into something that matters to others. I touched on this last week with David Foster Wallace’s definition of creative nonfiction, but it bears repeating. When you write essays for publication, you as the author don’t matter so much as does the effect your words will have on the reader. Sometimes that’s a subtle tweak – removing thought verbs that hold your reader at a remove. Or writing in a way that shows your reader how events impacted you, rather than telling your reader how you felt about what happened. Or trusting your readers to come to their own conclusions, instead of summarizing in a way that tells them how they should feel.

Sometimes transforming what reads like a journal into an essay to be read by others requires heavier lifting. Rowan has great examples of how to separate the wheat from the chaff in diary entries to suss out those stories that are worth expanding. In this case, you’re building an essay from the ground up, using your journal as a mere writing prompt.

As writers, it’s important to journal, to freewrite, to scribble out your morning pages, or to engage in whatever writing habit keeps you observing and recording life around you. But in your haste to hit publish, never confuse the purpose of your journal and the purpose of an essay. Your audiences are different, so your tone should be different, as should the way you structure your story, use dialogue, develop characters, and sketch out setting.

This week, before you post to the grid, read your entry one last time and think: Am I writing this for my own benefit? Am I writing this because I want my readers to think of me, the writer, first? Or am I truly writing so that my words have a more universal impact? Only when you can answer that last question with a solid “yes” should you hit publish and link up.

Nonfiction Know-How:

Saving Your Darlings

Reading someone else’s journal (unless the entry is about you) is about as exciting as looking at photos of a vacation to a place you’ve never been and didn’t want to go. But our journals are an important record of our lives, and as nonfiction writers we need that record to tell our stories. If you’ve ever wondered what to do with your old journal entries, or wanted to turn them into the kind of stories a reader wants to know more about, Rowan’s got some tips for you right here.

How to submit and fully participate in the challenge:

Basic YeahWrite guidelines: 1000 word limit; your entry can be dated no earlier than this past Sunday; nonfiction personal essay, creative opinion piece or mostly true story based on actual events.

1. In the sidebar of this week’s post, please grab the code beneath the nonfiction badge and paste it into the HTML view of your entry;
2. Follow the Inlinkz instructions after clicking “add your link” to upload your entry to this week’s challenge grid;
3. Your entry should appear immediately on the grid if you don’t receive an error message;
4. Please make the rounds to read all the entries in this week’s challenge; and
5. Consider turning off moderated comments and CAPTCHA on your own blog.

Submissions for this week’s challenges will close on Wednesday at 10pm ET. Voting will then open immediately thereafter and close on Thursday at 10pm ET. The winners, as always, will be celebrated on Friday.

Thank you for sharing with us your hard work! Good luck in the challenge…

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