How To Come Up With Ideas for Personal Essays
Asked to write a personal essay for class? First thing you’ll need to do is come up with a subject. The good news is, this form of creative nonfiction is among the easiest to brainstorm for ideas, since the medium is tailor made for topics that are particularly important to you.
If there is anything in particular that’s been consuming much of your conscious attention, whether that be an event in your life or a cause you’ve been following, the personal essay is a perfect format for exploring it (with the help of a grammar check tool, of course). In case you’re dealing with no such issues at the moment, a technique from the book, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, offers a great way to come up with a likely topic.
The approach goes this way:
- Think about ten things you can about deeply (you can do less, of course; when I first used this method, I picked three, namely combat sports, astronomy and comedy writing).
- Once you have those general subjects in place, you can begin narrowing them down to specific items that are more personal (e.g. for combat sports, the local MMA organization or my experiences competing in Sambo).
- Create as sweeping a list as you can come up with to allow yourself a wider range of topics to choose from.
- Start going through them and gauging strong your feelings are about each. Generally, the more opinions you have about a subject, the better it will be as material for your personal essay.