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...