David Sedaris’s 5 Tips for Turning Anecdotes Into Essays

First recognized for his story Santaland Diaries which he read on NPR’s Morning Edition in 1992, David Sedaris’s writing career has spanned almost three decades. He’s been nominated for five Grammy Awards for Best Spoken Word Album and Best Comedy Album, and received the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He and his sister, Amy—a writer and performer—write plays under the name The Talent Family that run at the La Mama Theater in New York City. Their shows include The Book of Liz, Incident at Cobbler’s Knob, and Stump the Host. He often weaves in hilarious anecdotes that include his parents and his five siblings—Paul, Gretchen, Tiffany, Lisa, and Amy Sedaris—or his partner Hugh.

An anecdote is a brief account of an event or incident from your real life. What separates an anecdote from a personal essay is that a personal essay involves a good story with a beginning, middle, and end, whereas an anecdote doesn’t have the full narrative arc of a story. When it comes to essay writing, it’s essential to mine your personal experience. When thinking about your personal story, you’ll need to know how to differentiate between a great story and a personal anecdote.

Essayists can use anecdotes from their everyday lives to build into a short story or essay, but simply writing anecdotes without expanding them into a brief story should be avoided. Here, David Sedaris walks you through his writing process and gives examples of anecdotes, pointing out which ones should be avoided and which can be expanded upon or included in a larger essay:

1. 1. “You need to be in the world and you need to be engaged with the world.” Essays are a type of writing that requires a writer to be looking for stories and interesting observations at all times. Sedaris didn’t start writing bestsellers. He wrote in small publications and in personal journals about the things he observed in the world around him. Building your observational skills and venturing out into the real world are important parts of becoming a good essayist and overcoming writer’s block.
2. 2. “Sometimes you can take incidents and stitch them together and make an essay.” Sometimes a real-life story is fully formed and ready to be turned into a larger essay that can capture readers’ attention and build to a larger point. Other times you think about a series of events from high school or the last year of your life that, despite the time gap, are thematically linked. It’s your job as a good writer to take these anecdotes and stitch them together into an essay. A Sedaris essay is oftentimes a first-person account of events from his adult life all the way back to when he was a small boy.
3. 3. “Every now and then, your subject comes right to you and sits in your lap.” If a story falls into your lap, you have to be ready to write about it right away. As a writer, it’s your job to start a new story when inspiration strikes. If you have an experience that you think could make a good essay, sit down to write about it the next day, while the memory is still fresh.
4. 4. “I had years' worth of diary entries. And you just find a way to assemble them and connect them so that they have meaning.” Sedaris combines disparate anecdotes into what he calls “kitchen sink” essays. It can be useful as a writer to keep a list of interesting stories that you might not be able to turn into an essay now but could be useful down the line.
5. 5. “When there is an opportunity to attach weight to something, you never want to turn it down. But at the same time, you have to know when you're forcing it.” Learning to let your stories speak for themselves—without overemphasizing emotion or inserting unnecessary literary devices and overwrought prose—is an important part of growing as a writer. If you’re writing about a story that you feel emotionally attached to, trust that your audience will pick up on that emotion and feel engaged.

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