Selling My Personal Essay Part One: Write and Rewrite

This is the first in a series of posts that will feature one of my essays. I am not posting the essay here, but it is titled "The Monster" and is about my experience running my first marathon. Follow along as I go through my process of preparing and submitting it for publication.

The first step is the obvious one. Write the essay, which I have done. This first step also includes a part that should go without saying, but I believe is underestimated by many new writers. That is to rewrite the essay, and rewrite the essay and possibly rewrite the essay again.

I actually wrote this essay twice, giving it a different feel in each version. After that I read each one carefully and compared the two side by side. My first rewrite consisted of elements from both essays.

Even after all that I rewrote the essay three more times. With each rewrite I tweaked it a little more so that it sounded good and all the parts worked just right.

When it comes to personal essay, you have to make people want to hear your story. When I write a first draft I am basically pouring words onto the page. The finished draft closely resembles one side of a conversation because thoughts are mixed and out of order. Just like conversation I am trying to think of the words as fast as I can say, or in this case, write them.

An essay, or any writing for that matter, has to pop. I want to make it go "BOOM!" so that it grabs the readers attention and makes them want to read through to the end.

So I rewrite the essay as many times as needed. Each rewrite builds on previous ones. Just because I am on the fourth draft does not mean that I forget about the first, second, or third drafts. Sometimes I find that piecing together parts of different rewrites can yield more interesting results.

This is the most important step in selling a personal essay. Write it, tweak it and continue to tweak it until it is perfect. Everyone has a story to tell, but I want people to read mine and enjoy doing it.

Next up in this series of posts I will be targeting markets for my essay. I will prioritize and list all the possible places to sell this essay and then go through that list like an assassin picking off targets.

So until then...

Distractions

I got a new toy this week. A new Digital SLR camera, the Nikon D3000. I have used point and shoot my entire life and have wanted to get away from that for a long time. I finally decided to do that and bought this great entry level camera.

Now the problem with this is the timing. I have a few writing projects that I am working on and NaNoWriMo started this week. Instead of writing as much as I planned to, I spent much of my time testing out the new camera and learning a lot about digital photography.

So instead of using the camera as a distraction I will now be using it as a reward. I have to polish up a personal essay for submission, finish the first draft of another personal essay, and catch up on my novel. I'll break this down into bite size chunks and only after I finish each item will I spend time with the camera.

I am looking forward to getting a lot of good pictures though. I am only a beginner, but I might see a photography blog in my future along with this one.