1. Mastering the Personal Experience
Article
by Deborah Newton
After Nora Ephron experienced a youthful incident that caused her some pain, her mother told her
to buck up because everything that happens to you is copy. Copy. Isaac Bashevis Singer once said, "If
you write about the things and the people you know best, you discover your roots." And Ben
Franklin's autobiography contains the words, "The next thing most like living one's life over again
seems to be a recollection of that life, and to make that recollection as durable as possible by putting
it down in writing."
Extrapolate those suggestions and what advice do you get? You should write about what you know.
What you've experienced. And what better form to write about your life's happenings than in a
personal experience article.
You've experienced things that can interest others. We all have. These happenings don't have to be
world-shattering -- just incidents that others can relate to, that others may find meaningful. As long
as you learned something from the experience -- even something as small as allowing you to see the
incident in a new light -- others will be able to relate to it. Of course, if the experience changed your
life in a profound way, all the better for this type of article. If you write about it with the right spin
and a salable structure, you can earn respectable money by turning your own personal experiences
into articles.
Women's magazines such as Redbook and Ladies Home Journal, men's magazines such as Details
and Heartland USA, and even religious magazines such as Guideposts Magazine and The Lutheran all
use true personal experience pieces. Confession magazines such as Black Secrets and True Love are
always on the lookout for fictionalized versions of personal experiences.
So, can you write and sell your personal experiences? Sure you can. Here's how.
Know Where to Begin
A tight structure is imperative for this type of article. Your focus must be strong. Once you've chosen
the incident you want to write about, your first step is to pick out the point or theme you want to
prove with your piece, and everything in your article must build to prove this point. "Crime doesn't
pay" is too broad a theme for a personal experience piece. If, however, you are able to narrow that
theme to "My ex-husband kidnapped our young daughter, and my faith in the justice system
prevailed because he was sent to jail when he was caught," this would be a good focus and would
make an excellent personal experience article.
So what is the formula for writing one of these pieces? I find the following structure works well for a
wide variety of these types of articles.

2. A personal experience story always starts on the day that something different happens to you (the
"I" character of your story if you're writing in the first person, or the viewpoint character if you are
telling someone else's story.) This incident becomes your "hook" because you use it to hook or
capture the reader's interest.
Strive to make the hook provocative enough that the reader wants to know what will happen to the
viewpoint character. A shocking statement works well as a personal experience hook ("I didn't think
it would feel so good to pull the trigger and watch my target lurch and fall to the ground.") Or an
anecdote that leaves a question in the reader's mind ("When I was ten and snooping through her
dresser drawer, I found out my mother wasn't a woman at all.")
Because of this incident or situation, you or your focus character has to react and decide how to
handle the problem. Usually, this decision will be wrong and will cause your main character stress
and suffering. He's chosen this path, however, for a reason that seems right to him.
The viewpoint character continues on the course charted by this decision until something happens
to change his attitude. A dark moment or turning point forces him to make a sacrifice or some sort
of choice which shows he has learned his lesson and can continue to a satisfactory conclusion to the
original problem. A definite theme emerges through the telling of the story. As long as your
viewpoint character learns something about himself or changes in some way, your story has done its
job.
Putting it in Practice: A Case Study
Confused? Don't be. Let's take this one step at a time with an example from a recently-published
article.
1) The Problem or Original Conflict (Your Hook). Your story or article always opens with an
occurrence of some sort which forces your main character to make a decision. She's sailing along in
life and suddenly, a problem pops up. This is where you start your piece (and not a moment sooner.)
For example, let's look at the September, 1999, issue of Ladies' Home Journal "Can This Marriage Be
Saved" column by Andrea Warren. The focus character, Rita, has remarried after her beloved
husband, the father of her two young children, was killed in the line of duty. Her problem is the fact
that she can't forget her first husband. The hook to the piece is a direct quote, which makes the
reader want to keep reading to find out how she solves her problem. ("Ken doesn't know this, but
lately I've been visiting the cemetery where my first husband is buried.")
2) The Reaction or Bad Decision. Your focus character reacts to the problem in a way that moves the
story along and extends the tension. She makes a bad choice of actions. Rita's wrong decision is to
overindulge her children, and when Ken, her new husband, tries to discipline them, she takes their
sides against their stepfather. This renders him lower in the new family's hierarchy than he should
be. The reader may at first see the folly of her ways and question why she has reacted this way, but
he will understand why she does it once he learns what has motivated her to do it.
3) Motivation. This is the reason your character made the bad choice she made. Rita's motivation,
told in a flashback, tells the story of how her first husband was killed in the line of duty. Because of

3. the grief she still suffers over the loss, she has become a pushover with her kids and lets them get
away with more than they should. She still sees her first marriage and family as the main
relationship in her life, and her second husband as just that--secondary. Motivation is often slipped
into the personal experience piece by way of a flashback, as in our example, which tells the
character's back story, pointing to why she made the choice she made. It's also acceptable to weave
the motivation in by means of introspection -- the character's inner thoughts -- as long as these
thoughts are kept short and don't break up the flow of the narrative.
4) The Body of the Story. Build your article with events that have been put into motion because of
your main character's original choice. Be sure to include only things that have direct bearing on the
story at hand. Don't bog down the piece with incidentals such as what the focus character had for
breakfast last Tuesday unless that menu in some way contributes to the outcome of the piece. The
body of Rita's story tells about the bitter arguments that ensue over the discipline of the children
when her new husband arrives on the scene.
5) The Dark Moment or Crisis. Your focus character can't go on living with this choice he's made
because if he does, we have no story and he can't learn or change from his original (wrong) decision.
So, a crisis occurs.
Rita's crisis occurs when Ken begins to withdraw from the family unit and Rita stands to lose him.
6) Sacrifice or Reactive Choice. Your focus character must make some sort of sacrifice or choice in
order to learn her lesson and make a change. Rita's sacrifice is to see a marriage counselor, and her
choice is to follow the counselor's advice of putting her new husband above her children in the
family dynamic.
7) Satisfactory Ending. Note, I didn't say happy ending because the conclusion of your personal
experience piece doesn't necessarily have to be happy. It needs only be the right ending for the
particular situation. If you or your viewpoint character's bad decision was something horrible like
robbing a bank or injuring another person, you/she probably doesn't deserve to live happily ever
after. Your ending must reflect that while you have suffered and learned this life lesson, that may
not exonerate you from suffering further consequences in your life. The satisfactory ending in our
sample piece shows Rita's and Ken's attempts at making time for each other and building strength as
a couple. In the Ladies' Home Journal example, the second part of the story is also told from Ken's
point of view, showing his problem, reaction, motivation, etc.
8) Theme. After you've drafted your personal experience piece, go back over it to check to see if
you've developed the theme you set out to develop. If you've gone off on other tangents, rework
the piece to eliminate them. For a tight personal experience piece, only one theme should dominate.
So, there's one basic structure of the modern-day personal experience piece. F. Scott Fitzgerald said,
"A writer wastes nothing." Don't waste your personal experiences. Look into your own life or the life
of someone close to you for personal experiences and write about them. The market is hungry for
these types of articles. Make them work for you.