Join us for How to Pitch a Personal Essay with Cara Benson happening on Saturday, April 25th. We are pleased to share instructor, Cara Benson's, philosophy and approach.

I’ll cut to the chase: the world of publishing is awash in millions of stories. You want yours to be one of them. While there are no guarantees that a particular publication will pick your writing up, there are best practices for helping your words to rise above the rest in an editor’s inbox. Here are a few we’ll cover in the upcoming “How to Pitch a Personal Essay” seminar:

1. Take a stab at a headline.

This may well be rewritten if your essay gets picked up, but including a headline in your pitch serves a few functions. First, it shows editors that your story has a focus. This sounds obvious. And yet, I have found that working with personal material can be especially challenging to organize into a coherent piece. Condensing my amorphous life experience into a ten word title has proven to be an extremely useful tool in getting the story straight for myself. Second, it demonstrates that you can write for their audience, which brings me to the next tip.

2. Read the publications you want to write for.

Another obvious point, but I’m talking about doing some deep dives. More than merely finding journals or magazines that regularly publish personal essays on my chosen topics, I track the publications I’m interested in working with. I spend days reading through archives to get a feeling for not only the types of stories they publish, but the voice and style of those stories. This is also helpful in more ways than one. First, it can actually spark ideas for me. I may have life experiences or ideas that I hadn’t considered as an essay until absorbing the myriad ways writers are making meaning of their lives in this specific form. Second, it can show me if what I’m about to pitch has just been covered in their pages. (I’ve had this happen more times than I care to count, but it does help me to take it all less personally.)

3. Include researched material.

Yes, I know we’re talking about personal essays. No, I’m not telling you that your piece on getting stranded with your Aunt Bernice on the side of County Route 66 in the snowstorm of the century has to cover the cycles of precipitation like a meteorologist. (That actually sounds pretty great.) But maybe the accumulation of moisture in the clouds is a great vehicle to investigate your relationship with your mother’s sister. Or considering your family in the context of superstorms brought on by climate change – or vice versa – could bring forward unexpected elements of the story. And if you wind up learning something new while writing the piece, then you have a much better shot at engaging a reader, in this case, an editor you are hoping to entice into working with you on the piece.

We’ll get into more tools and tactics to enliven and polish personal essay pitches in the workshop. In the meantime, don’t despair! I know I opened this post with some hard truths, so I’ll close it with this: the world loves good stories. There may be lots of people writing them, but that’s because humans love to read them! So, keep at it, writers. You’ll find your readers, and they will find you.
 

Sign up for How to Pitch a Personal Essay today. Scholarships are available!