The Dinner Table Problem

As an editor for Catapult magazine and Don’t Write Alone, one of the most common issues I come across when reading pitches and drafts (of personal essays, particularly, though this lesson can really be applied to any kind of writing, even fiction) is what I like to call “the Dinner Table Problem.” A writer might pitch me with an interesting and engaging story, but fail to answer the question: Why does this need to be an essay rather than a story that friends tell each other over the dinner table? More than anything else, I believe this has to do with how the author has chosen to engage their audience.

I think it’s a bad idea, even a potentially harmful one, to ask writers to consider their audience when they are drafting, so do be assured I am not saying that. You should write what you want, following your gut or heart or brain or breath or whatever part of you is called out to pen a story, whether fiction, nonfiction, or somewhere in between. However, many things really only need to be written, but not read; the vast, oceanic majority of my own work sits on my computer and in notebooks and will never journey elsewhere. But when you do decide to publish—or even more loosely, when you’d like to find readers for your work—you must consider why an audience should want to engage with your writing.

Let’s return to the Dinner Table Problem while we are considering audience. Just as you might tell your mother a different story than you would your best friend—or, at the very least, might edit your tale—the story you are telling a broad audience of readers who have no connection to you will be different than the story you tell to those who love you.

More frankly, the question we could pose is: “Why should readers care about this?” That’s a question I know we have heard before, but I think considering it as the Dinner Table Problem gives us leeway in how we can answer that question. For instance, if your audience is your friend or lover, they care a lot about you; it’s not going to matter to them so much what story you tell. They just want to learn more about the human they love. A personal story helps them do that.

On the other hand, if you are pitching an editor, the editor will have different versions of this question in their mind. Has another writer already published a similar kind of story with their publication recently? Are you writing a topic that’s particularly zeitgeisty, that lots of other people are considering as well? If so, you can answer the question by distinguishing your piece from others like it: “Although I know you recently published this piece on XYZ, mine considers the story from a different angle, which is . . .” If you are telling a personal story, you also have to be able to share why someone who doesn’t love you deeply and dearly will care about it. An essay about your wedding day might be something that your husband will cherish forever, but what does a stranger gain—or learn, or discover, or reconsider about themselves or the ways we live—from reading your story?

At Catapult, the personal essays we publish often interweave an author’s lived experience with broader cultural connections, whether those threads are tied to pop culture, history, art, or research. Bringing in different stories that we tell ourselves as a culture (or as a subculture) will often shed new light on your own story. This, in and of itself, often provides interest and connection for your readers. If you are telling a deeply personal tale and are not trying to make broader connections and instead illuminate, say, something about the way an individual might move through the world, it can be very effective to bring in different parts of your own personal history and shove them up against each other (rather than giving us a simple play-by-play, “this happened and then this happened and then this happened”). Take this gorgeous essay by Elizabeth Muller, which blends family history, a medical scare, and wildfires. It’s complex and interwoven; when I first read Elizabeth’s draft, I was certain that it was a story that could only be told in an essay.

There are a myriad of ways of answering the Dinner Table Problem and you’ll have to figure out whichever solution is the right one for your work. However, I will leave you with a pearl of wisdom from Melissa Febos, who tells us, in her book Body Work, of writing her first memoir, “All that has been required of me to write about something is this change of heart. A shift toward, or away, or perhaps a desire to return to some truer version of myself.”

Like Febos, I believe that this desire to write toward something truer is a kernel that can fuel the fire of writing, and describing a moment or process of change is something inherently interesting. If you are driven to describe a change in your own life or the lives of your characters, it may very well help you answer the Dinner Table Problem.

When I read drafts that don’t consider audience in this way—drafts that don’t answer the Dinner Table Problem—I often leave the piece with a sort of feeling of so-what-ness. So what? I know you want to share your story because you feel it’s interesting and engaging—or at the very least, because this particular tale has its teeth in you and won’t seem to let go until you share it. As storytellers, it’s our job to draw people in, to show them the point of “so what?”

You have the ability to take a story, something that happened only to you and couldn’t have happened to anyone else, and provide the audience with an avenue of connection—whether that makes them feel less alone or refracts the norms of the world in a way that shows us colors we’d never noticed before, the way a prism cuts a beam of light.

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