Over the years, I have written tons of personal essays — many of which have been published in print for cash. Personal essays are slightly harder to write than articles, but not by much. After a little practice, you will probably be writing them in your sleep. Readers tend to respond more to personal essays than articles, since the writer reveals more about himself.

I usually write essays between 500 and 2,000 words. That seems the ideal length for most magazines and websites. A rule of thumb for personal essays is to start by discussing something very specific to you and then expand that out to a universal theme or life lesson.

Don’t be worried if the universal theme you find turns out to be an old cliche. People enjoy being reminded that life is worth living, money isn’t everything, things are going to be OK, the good are eventually rewarded, and that all people have the same problems, more or less. In fact, the greatest art is often considered great simply because it reminds us of such simple truths when we forget.

Parts Of The Personal Essay

Most personal essays seem to have two basic sections, which I will call the Motivation and the Reaction.

The Motivation – You describe something that happened to you, something you saw, an anecdote or news event.

The Reaction – You explain what you learned from the Motivation, your opinion of the event, the implications, or lessons the reader can learn from it.

It’s really that simple. An example of a short personal essay might be two paragraphs describing something that happened to you, followed by two paragraphs describing what you learned from this or how it made you think differently about a common situation.

An example of a longer personal essay might include two paragraphs of Motivation, five or six different paragraphs of Reaction (each with a different observation about the Motivation), and finally a short conclusion summarizing the main point that you think the reader should take away from your essay.

That last sentence reminds me of something else worth mentioning: Before I sit down to write anything, I always ask myself, “What reaction do I want the reader to have to this?” How do I want him to feel? Do I want him to take some kind of action? Do I want him to think more deeply about a topic?

Now Your Turn

This is just a general formula for personal essays, and no one should follow it too rigidly; I certainly don’t. But I hope it will give you a starting point for writing personal essays if you don’t already have one.

Remember, all you need is to notice something (Motivation) and comment on it (Reaction), and you’ll never be short of personal essays to crank out as needed.

There are two kinds of writers in the world: Imaginative Writers and Pragmatic Writers. Imaginative Writers are people who dream in fiction. They generally love novels and fantasy. They have a gift for drama.

The second kind of writer is the Pragmatic Writer. The Pragmatic Writer typically reads non-fiction, interviews, and biographies. The Pragmatic Writer likes learning about the real world.

What is Your Writing Style?

The good news is that it’s very simple to find out what kind of writer you are. The bad news is that you don’t get to choose. The way to find out what kind of writer you are is to ask yourself, “What do I like to read?” Or better yet, “What can I not put down?”

Whatever it is that you can’t stop reading — or thinking about — is the thing you will likely be good at writing. Whatever else you try to write will probably be mediocre at best. Who but someone that loved Westerns ever wrote a good Western novel?

I first got paid for writing about 7 years ago. The first thing I got published was a short essay. That little bit of success made me decide to attempt a bigger, more serious project. I never stopped to consider that the thing I had written — effortlessly and with joy — was the type of thing I myself enjoyed reading. So I wasted a few years writing short stories and two novels (now sitting in the bottom of a cardboard box). The process was painful and depressing because I was trying to write the wrong thing for me.

Meanwhile, I kept getting little essays published, as well as short articles on the Web. I didn’t think of this as serious writing, yet I did it effortlessly, enjoyed the work, and received good feedback from others. Luckily, I finally

realized that this was what I was meant to write in the first place. I had made the mistake of thinking that for something to be good, it must be painful to create. Nothing could be further from the truth. As Jack Woodford once said, “A genius is a genius because he gets it right the first time.”

Publishing Short Articles and Essays

It’s easy to get articles and essays published. These can include profiles, reviews, interviews, and how-to pieces. Pragmatic Writers tend to write short, since they are mainly interested in facts rather than filler. This can be an advantage. Today’s readers prefer short pieces for Web-based content. If a Pragmatic Writer wants to publish a whole book, he can simply collect a bunch of essays into a single volume.

To uncover your own writing style, it’s important not only to notice what you like to read, but also the form and style. Pay attention to your “guilty pleasures” that you can enjoy effortlessly. Some non-fiction writers, for example, like to do tons of research. Personally, I enjoy writers who non-formally collect a lot of information on a subject, due to their own interest, and then write the actual piece off the top of their heads. That is my writing style too — find yours and some kind of success will follow.

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Note: This piece was first written for Orato.com (link to original) in June 2009. Orato is a good place to get something published online.

I got some good feedback from that. Some people said that I had obviously set up a false dichotomy. Plenty of writers write both non-fiction and fiction successfully. And that’s true. This advice is more a heuristic for someone who is not writing anything successfully and trying to discover what to write.

OK, I’ve been thinking about reviving Spiddlement for a while now.

We disappeared last March when I moved to another town, and then just never got back in a blogging routine. But a few things made me decide to revive it:

1- I read Penelope Trunk’s Guide to Blogging. It inspired me the way she encourages people to just do it and not worry about all the small details. Kind of the way I think about playing rock music — just have fun, you learn along the way.

2- This blog still gets TONS of traffic every day — even though I haven’t posted in five months. The search engines find it easily. If you fill up a blog with a lot of content, it’s amazing how people will still read it and comment on old posts even years later.

And once the search engines can find you, the blog becomes a powerful medium for posting NEW ideas worth getting out in the world.

So Spiddlement is back. Don’t look for new posts every day, but keep us in your RSS.

“Dwarfed Punk, Daft Punk’s epic song set to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Link (Thanks to Neatorama)

With college costs continuing to soar and more college graduates struggling to make their student loan payments, the Reduce The Rate Petition is urging lawmakers to extend the benefits of the federal bailout to students.

Rev. Jesse Jackson has launched a new website to bring attention to the Student Loan Crisis in America.

He also recently appeared on Democracy Now! alongside Alan Collinge, author of the book The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt In U.S. History And How We Can Fight Back.

If you have student loans or have a family member with student loans, here’s how YOU can learn about this issue and help:

1. Visit Jackson’s new website ReduceTheRate.org, which advocates reducing the interest rate on student loans to 1%.

2. Visit StudentLoanJustice.org, which advocates restoring standard consumer protections to student loans.

3. Watch Rev. Jackson and Alan Collinge on Democracy Now! for full details.

4. Read The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt In U.S. History And How We Can Fight Back by Alan Collinge.

5. Listen to Alan Collinge interviewed on the Michael Savage Radio Show.

Cool song from the 1994 album Rock Animals.

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I wrote this article years ago for a website that is unfortunately now offline. Luckily, I had a back-up copy in my archives. It will probably seem a very simplistic explanation to a serious jazz lover, yet I think it might be a good start for a person who knows nothing about jazz and is interested in dipping his toe in the water. Hope to post a few other “lost essays” from that website in the future, as the fresh content seems to be decreasing lately here at the Spiddlement office while we work on a few unrelated projects.

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How To Understand Jazz Music

For much of my life, I was needlessly intimidated by jazz music. A lot of people who come from a pop music background are. I mean, I liked jazz music a lot, thought it sounded great, but I never understood it.

Whenever I would see a live jazz band playing in the park, it was easy to enjoy the groove and notice the proficiency of the musicians. But what kind of structure were they using? It certainly wasn’t the “verse-chorus-verse” structure of pop tunes like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Be My Baby”, or even the Tin Pan Alley structure of early pop and show tunes like “Come Fly With Me” and “‘Til There Was You”.

Sometimes I heard songs that I recognized played by jazz bands, songs like “Night and Day”, “Stella By Starlight”, “Georgia On My Mind”, or “Midnight At The Oasis”. I could relate to the great melodies, but was amazed at the way the players would totally deconstruct these songs and create new interpretations on the spot. How the heck did they do that? I finally decided that I would try to solve the mystery of jazz music.

Traditional Structure of Jazz Music

You don’t have to know how jazz music works to enjoy it, but it certainly makes things a lot more fun. The explanation I will offer here is probably not technical enough for some jazz lovers; that’s OK, I am writing this for newbies as a stepping stone to get further into jazz.

OK, down to brass tacks: The most important part of a jazz song is the beginning. A jazz song is like a newspaper story; the band gives you all the important information in the “first paragraph”, and then expands on the information and reveals more details if you decide to “keep reading”.

A traditional jazz song opens with the whole band playing the melody first. Sometimes this is called the “theme”. If a band does a cover of “Georgia On My Mind”, for example, they would start by playing the main melody (the part of the song that the singer would usually sing) together. If you are seeing a live jazz band, listen for the beginning to hear the theme – during the rest of the performance, the musicians will be expanding and improvising around that theme. Also, some jazz songs feature a short introductory riff played just before the main theme.

Improvisation: What Makes Jazz So Cool

After the main melody is finished, here comes the fun part. The rest of the song features each of the individual players improvising around the theme. This involves playing their own original melodies, usually created live as you hear them, around the notes and chords in the melody. This is where jazz musicians really have a chance to shine and show their chops. This is why no two jazz performances are ever totally the same.

For example, after the beginning of the song is concluded, the guitarist might play a solo. He will take some of the elements of the song’s melody and rearrange them in his own way. This takes a lot of skill and is really fun to watch. Next, the saxophone player might do the same thing. Then, the organ player, the bass player, and sometimes even the drummer will take a solo.

While each member of the band is soloing and improvising, the other members of the jazz band will continue playing, but will be more in the background. Mostly they are playing chords, rhythms, fills, etc. This is called “comping”, short for accompanying. It may seem like they are not doing as much as the soloist, but their contributions are very important to hold the structure of the song together. It takes a lot of skill to stay in the background, not drawing attention to themselves, while still being creative and adding little flourishes that make the song more interesting.

If a member of the band plays a really good solo, the audience will often clap after their part in the song. One of the fun parts of jazz is hearing each player’s interpretation of the melody, as well as how the individual instruments sound both alone and together. A typical jazz band usually consists of guitar; piano, organ, or keyboard; bass guitar; drums; and brass (saxophone, trumpet, trombone, etc.), but may have almost any instrument you could imagine (marimbas, jazz banjo, flute, clarinet, etc.)

Now For The Big Finish

At the end of the song, when all the players have shown their stuff, the band will usually return to the main theme and play it again, often exactly as they did at the beginning of the song. It’s always fun to hear the original melody repeated after they have played it in many different ways. The band might also repeat the introductory riff. When you hear the main melody again, you know that the song has come to an end. At this point, you can applaud loudly and know that you have not only enjoyed a jazz song but also understood its structure.

Jazz is not just limited to the traditional structure, of course. There are many variations. A lot of “vocal jazz” or “jazz pop” has a structure similar to a regular pop song, but uses more complex jazz chords, jazz-style melodies, or jazz chord voicings. Jazz pop is even easier to understand than the traditional jazz structure, so it is a natural entryway into jazz for a lot of people. One of the first jazz pop bands I really liked was Steely Dan, who practically invented the genre. Other kinds of jazz may have different structures or no structure at all (and these can be fun too, once you get over your initial fear of jazz!), but most jazz will follow the structure I have described above.

With A Twist of Lime

Jazz originated in New Orleans at around the start of the 20^th century. It was originally a musical form played by and enjoyed by regular people, mostly blues musicians inspired by African musical traditions. It’s funny that so many people are intimidated by jazz today and think it’s so complicated. It is complicated to play and requires talent, but it’s fun, fun, fun to listen to and easy to appreciate.

Now that you understand the basic structure, go enjoy some jazz music! Be sure to get a table in the front row of the jazz club, where you can really hear the band. Order a Cuba Libre to sip while you’re enjoying the music – and I recommend ordering one with Malibu rum since you’re cool.

Miho Hatori’s video for “Barracuda”, 2006.

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