Nicolas Cole says writers who want to write personal essays usually mean they want freedom to choose any subject and also get published or make money. A personal essay is a style choice, not a genre. To succeed, you need to know who you're writing for and what problem you're solving for them.
I think that when people say, "I wanna write personal essays," what they're really saying is, "I want a license to write what I want to write about," which is fine, but then simultaneously going, "And I want to unlock some sort of external result." You kind of have to start from a place of realizing that those are two different aspirations. And the way that you get them to work together is you realize personal essay is really just a style. It's just you being like, "I wanna write it in a certain way." And you can absolutely do that. It's just in order to unlock some sort of external result, you have to have an awareness and ideally a focus on, okay, but who is this for? And that will help give you some direction of, here's the topic I want to write about, here's the person that I'm trying to help, and here is their expectation.
What Every Writer Gets Wrong About Their Audience #writing #creator #writingtips
