“There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting x-ray vision and animal-like hearing.”
This deeply honest personal essay by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee is an account of her eleven-year struggle to publish her first novel. Like all good writing, this essay is intensely focused on arrestingly personal emotional details, but also roams larger than its author in embodying a common narrative arc: that of difficulty and adversity met by eventual success.
“It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive?”
A disarmingly open piece of writing, this moving personal essaytells the story of the time CJ Hauser called off her engagement and joined an expedition to study the whooping crane in Texas. Encountering a parallel between a Japanese folk tale, the crane expedition, and the dynamic of her former relationship, the writer poignantly reflects on the differences between thriving and just getting by. This essay is particularly effective at charting the arc of the writer’s personality, as it weaves multiple elements together to reach a moment of clarity.
18. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
“The feeling of something coming true, or of something speaking to you through the cards, is probably the hardest part of reading the Tarot.