When to go personal - What’s your story?

Writing to Persuade: How to Bring People Over to Your Side - Trish Hall 2019

When to go personal
What’s your story?

You’ve figured out what you want to write about—what you need to say, what will stand out, what you have the authority to tell. Now, how do you present it?

Not every essay needs a personal aspect. Sometimes, though, it makes sense to go personal. Some pieces are more powerful and persuasive when the writer’s story is central to the piece.

Angelina Jolie was the perfect example. She used her fame to tell her personal story—not to aggrandize herself, but to help others.

I happened to be working at home on the day her representative called. I liked being alone at home occasionally, reading and editing. Sometimes the office felt like a tight turtleneck. At home I could breathe, space out, daydream.

My deputy, Sewell Chan, emailed me to say that an op-ed submission would be coming from Jolie, and did I want to come into the office and handle it. The Times was only 15 minutes by subway from my apartment. I understood why he asked. Even newspaper people who never deal with celebrities and show no signs of being in awe of them might be excited about Jolie. She was one of the biggest stars in the world.

I figured Sewell wanted me to say that I wouldn’t come in. And so that’s what I did. I knew he would enjoy it. A deputy rarely gets to be in charge, and yet does tons of work. I told him, she’s all yours.

Later that day, Jolie delivered a piece not about an upcoming film, but about having her breasts removed after discovering she had a gene that predisposed her to breast cancer.

Her writing brought in millions of views and perhaps changed the way some women looked at being screened for their genetic risk of breast cancer. Maybe some got tested for the BRCA1 gene who otherwise would not have considered it. Maybe her article helped some women live to see their children in their first jobs and their first adult homes. I hope so.

Jolie’s piece showed the power of using the personal. If she had simply called for more women to get tested, or had even just written that the gene ran in her family, it wouldn’t have been so moving. By writing about her breast amputation, Jolie took the chance that her image would be forever changed. That was a huge gamble. Jolie was putting her financial livelihood at risk. If men would no longer be able to buy into the fantasy of her as a sex goddess because they couldn’t help visualizing her breast surgery, would she still be successful?

It’s scary for us regular people to put personal stuff out there. Imagine the calculation of cost and benefit it takes for a famous person to do it. Betty Ford, the first lady in the 1970s, was bravely open about her long struggle with alcohol and drugs. The writer Andrew Solomon talked about having depression, as did William Styron. These well-known people put the health of others above their personal desire for privacy.

The next time Jolie’s people got in touch, almost two years later, I was in the office, and so I handled the piece. I worked with Arminka Helic, a British politician and friend of Jolie’s. I would have expected one of the most famous women in the world to have a gaggle of public relations consultants, so I was surprised to learn Jolie didn’t work that way. For things like this, she depended on Arminka.

There was much debate among the editors over whether we needed another piece, part two in the gutting of a famous woman. I felt we did, because she had already put herself out there with a personal and compelling story, establishing a connection with our readers. I argued that running it wouldn’t be simply voyeuristic. The second one wouldn’t be as shocking, but any woman in a similar situation wanted to know—what happened next to someone with the genetic risk for breast and ovarian cancer?

In her second story, Jolie wrote about having her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed to further minimize the chance of getting cancer. It was less surprising, the second time, although still moving and personal.

Indeed, it was her story, and only her story.

Some of the most popular pieces we ran were revealing and intimate. Often they had to do with elemental issues of life and death, family relations, addiction, and stress. The writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks documented his discovery that he had terminal cancer and wrote about it in a series for the Times; the final story ran just two weeks before he died. If he or Jolie had been reluctant to share personal details, they would have produced weaker pieces that readers most likely would not have remembered. But these writers weren’t reticent. They didn’t obfuscate; they were direct and unsentimental.

When you decide that your personal details will make the story stronger, whether you’re a young man writing about the acne that is tormenting you or an old woman writing about her joyful sense of freedom when a long-loathed husband dies, you have to tell it—even if you’re afraid it’s trivial or embarrassing or certain to bring out hateful comments online. Best to expect that, and avoid reading comments. And remember that vicious people are responding to the personal details because all people are. You don’t always hear from those who were moved to laugh or cry.

For many people, revealing personal information is frightening. They worry it will make them seem weak or detract from what they consider their intellectual or professional achievements. I consult with clients who want help with their op-eds, and recently worked with an accomplished author. When I pushed her to put more personality into her op-ed submission, she was adamant: “I don’t do personal,” she said. She didn’t want to talk about the way her childhood connected to the policy arguments she was making. But that childhood had shaped her views and given her a perspective that others didn’t have. Providing those details would have made her article richer. She was hurting her piece by refusing to make herself human to the reader.

I often feel rude pushing writers for personal details, but I’m just trying to make their articles more memorable. Sharing personal information can be tough for journalists because many of them are accustomed to keeping private information out of their work. Writers have to do what is right for them, and when I was working with contributors who were regulars, I usually didn’t push.

You will have to figure out how much personal detail you are willing to share. Sometimes I insisted on more details as a condition of publishing an article.

One day I heard from a top literary agent that one of his friends had a story about suicide to tell, and would I be interested. The friend was Will Lippincott, a literary agent who had ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after being discharged, convinced he would never get better, Will made a plan to die. He went up to his country house to kill himself, but at the last minute aborted his plan. In a different facility, he discovered a treatment called dialectical behavior therapy that changed his life, and he wanted to write about it for the Times and, as his agent friend put it, “spread the word.”

I was intrigued by that email and eager to read the essay. But when it arrived, I was disappointed. Will was indeed spreading the word about the treatment, but he withheld details of his experience. That was his mistake. Not to be totally callous, which of course good editors must sometimes be, but if he wanted the piece to be published, he had to talk much more about his own trauma and much less about promoting the treatment.

That wasn’t just my opinion. Other editors who read his piece had the same reaction, and although their remarks might have seemed insensitive, we were all seeking the same result: the best possible story. Of course it helped that we made our comments to one another in email and, unless one of us messed up, the writer never saw the comments in their raw, brutal form. Typical of the comments was this one: “The suicidal half is way more interesting and compelling than the second half. I think it can be fixed if he adds more personal reflection, and dials down the rah-rah tone.” So I had to ask Will to expose himself much more—to describe how he felt, say why he decided to kill himself, and explain why he then decided not to.

This was someone I had never met and probably never would, so it seemed invasive to demand that he tell our readers details that his family might not have known. I felt a little ashamed. Was I being a jerk? Will was well known in the world of book publishing, and putting out all that personal info might be something he just couldn’t do. But he did it, and he wrote a powerful article because he felt so driven to introduce others to the treatment that had saved his life.

Many writers make that same mistake, talking more in generalities than in the specifics that would make their stories stronger and give them more persuasive power. A former hedge-fund trader named Sam Polk once sent a draft of an article dealing with his wealth addiction. I liked the idea and thought that it might be a Sunday cover. Sam said he had written two versions, so I asked him to send the longer one as well.

He had a great first sentence: “In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.75 million—and I was angry, resentful.” He thought he deserved more. He was envious of his bosses for earning larger bonuses. He wanted more money, he wrote, for the same reason an alcoholic wants a drink: “I was addicted to it.”

But the essay went downhill from there. It had too many general statements about addiction and not nearly enough about Sam’s life. I needed to understand what in his family dynamic made the accumulation of money so important. I wanted to know more about his father, who Sam believed had transmitted the philosophy that money solves all problems.

Sam was gracious, and eager to tell his story. He revised the article to add the particulars about his own experience, and it became one of our best-read Sunday covers. Because Sam had abused drugs and alcohol, he realized, with the help of a counselor, that his relationship with money was similarly addictive. He wrote that there were no twelve-step programs for money addicts, because our culture lauds the addiction.

Not all personal stories have to be grim, about matters like depression and addiction. Tim Kreider, an essayist and cartoonist who frequently contributes to the Times, wrote about his passion for his cat—a piece that was later selected for a book on the best essays of the year. The story could have been silly, but it was profound. (And of course, besides loving the article, I knew that our audience shared my interest in animals. The traffic on good animal stories is always high.)

Tim talked about his relationship with the cat to make larger points about human nature and what it’s like to live alone and then with a cat. He was honest and he was funny, and he wasn’t embarrassed to be writing about a cat. He talked about how demanding she was, so physically close to him that if a woman came over, the cat would force herself between the two of them. He wrote that one of his girlfriends accused him of being in love with the cat. With his typical deadpan humor, he went on to say, “To be fair, she was a very attractive cat.”

Some writers intuitively know that their personal story is the way to go, and they don’t have to be pushed. A good editor simply has to get out of the way and not hurt the story. One day we received an op-ed from Mona Simpson, the novelist. It was Simpson’s eulogy of her brother, Steve Jobs. They had both been adopted as children and hadn’t met until they were adults, but then they became close. All we had to do was quickly fact-check the piece and put it on the web. There is no reason to mess with well-done work just to earn your pay. Simpson detailed her brother’s personality through thousands of words that were impossible to stop reading, until she ended it with his final words in this world: “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

All of us have stories to tell. The strongest ones, the ones that people will remember, often reveal something almost painfully personal even as they connect to a larger issue or story that feels both universal and urgent. The next time you read a news story that interests you, think about how your story might illuminate it. Has your state just put restrictions on abortions? Did your mother have an abortion after having several children, in a decision that affected your family forever? Tell that story. When you were eighteen, did you have a motorcycle crash that was caused by a pothole? You might write about the country’s crumbling infrastructure and the personal and health costs from neglecting our roads. Your story, no matter your age or your level of education, will help readers remember what you have said, and they will be more likely to be persuaded by the policy points you are making.

The details of your life will help make your story moving as well as convincing.