Dear diary (don’t)
The trick to writing good memoir – and personal essays are a form of memoir – is making sure you don’t tell the reader more about yourself than you intended. What you thought was a funny story might end up being, well, unintentionally revealing. And then there’s the details! Too many, and an essay starts to sound like a diary entry. There’s nothing there to draw the reader in, no connection between the writer and the reader. Here at YeahWrite, we call that connection the “so what.” One thing our winning essays have in common is a strong so-what. Extraneous details have been edited out, and what’s left is just the right amount of building blocks to make a bridge between writer and reader.
To all of our writers, we hope you’ve had as much fun writing as we had coming up with the prompts. It’s always tough to find an idea that is flexible enough to let you spread your writing wings, but constrained enough to challenge you. In this case, we couldn’t be happier with the quality of the entries. In fact, there were barely a handful of points separating first place from the honorable mentions, so we hope that each of you will consider submitting your essays to your favorite creative nonfiction publications – after taking a few days to process your feedback and add a layer of polish, of course!
Fanfare, please…
Here we go! You’re here to find out who the winners are. So with no further ado:
First Place
$200
Jessica Vergara
I Know Her
Second Place
$150
Donna-Louise Bishop
The Passport
Third Place
$100
Rose Camara
On Searching and Losing and Finding and Loss
Honorable Mention:
- J. Lynne Moore – Losing the Plan
- M. Lea Gray – Cash Money Clueless
Runners-up:
(in alphabetical order)
- Michelle Hanley
- Tonya Elise Jubyna
- Jack Woolverton
Congratulations again to everyone who entered. Hopefully you’re finding your feedback useful and relevant! Personal essays are some of the hardest work to receive feedback on because it feels so, well, personal. If you’re not ready for your feedback yet, try walking away from it right now. Set a reminder and look at it again in a month or so, or get a trusted reader to help you make the connections or see if it’s fair, even if you don’t like it or disagree with a decision or suggestion. In the meantime…
Wait, wait, there’s more!
Writers, if you don’t have your feedback, please send us an email at superchallenge@yeahwrite.me, ’cause that email should have reached you on Wednesday.
Now that the competition is over, you’re free to post your work anywhere on the Internet you like, or take our judges’ suggestions and rework your submission to send on to other venues. If you get published, don’t forget to drop us a line so we can cheer for you!
About the author:
Rowan submitted exactly one piece of microfiction to YeahWrite before being consumed by the editorial darkside. She spent some time working hard as our Submissions Editor before becoming YeahWrite’s Managing Editor in 2016. She was a BlogHer Voice of the Year in 2017 for her work on intersectional feminism, but she suggests you find and follow WOC instead. In real life she’s been at various times an attorney, aerialist, professional knitter, artist, graphic designer (yes, they’re different things), editor, secretary, tailor, and martial artist. It bothers her vaguely that the preceding list isn’t alphabetized, but the Oxford comma makes up for it. She lives in Portlandia with a menagerie which includes at least one other human. She tells lies at textwall and uncomfortable truths at CrossKnit.
