# Creative Writing: Crafting Personal Essays with Impact - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/creative-writing-crafting-personal-essays-with-impact/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Writing · Quick win · Rated 7 /10 # Creative Writing: Crafting Personal Essays with Impact By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Roxane Gay · Writer & Editor All levels · 61 min Roxane Gay distills her personal-essay process into a tight hour of craft thinking, but offers no exercises or feedback loop to practice it. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fcreative-writing-crafting-personal-essays-with-impact%2F1709959838) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. Roxane Gay teaches this class the way she talks about her own process: unhurried, plainspoken, and allergic to formula. There is no five-step template here, no fill-in-the-blank essay outline. Instead the class moves through a sequence of craft questions an experienced essayist actually asks herself before, during, and after drafting, and the value of the course rests almost entirely on how clearly she answers them. The strongest stretch is the middle third, where Gay lays out what she calls looking inward and outward. The idea is simple to state and hard to execute: a personal essay fails if it reads like a diary entry with no awareness of a world beyond the writer, and it fails just as badly if it drowns in research and context until the personal voice disappears. She walks through her own essay "The Careless Language of Sexual Violence" and Ariel Levy's "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" as working examples, showing where each writer plants a personal scene and where she pulls back to widen the lens. The suggestion to literally highlight a published essay in two colors, one for inward, one for outward, is the kind of concrete exercise that could genuinely change how a writer reads their own draft. Gay is also unusually candid about the mechanics writers rarely discuss out loud: how to fact-check your own memory against old emails and blog posts, how to decide what belongs to you alone versus what a reader needs, and how to protect the people who appear in your nonfiction without lying to your reader. Her line about never being a hero or a victim in your own work, borrowed from Dinty Moore, is a genuinely useful editing lens, not a platitude. Where the course thins out is anywhere it brushes against structure and mechanics rather than philosophy. The section on writing a first draft gestures at narrative frames and scene-building but never breaks a scene down on the page or shows a before-and-after revision. Revision itself is treated almost dismissively, with Gay actively pushing back on the idea that revision is where the real writing happens, which is a defensible personal stance but leaves newer writers with little to actually do once the first draft is finished beyond reading it aloud. The publishing segment is honest and practical, naming Duotrope and The Writer's Market and warning against paying to submit, but it is closer to a résumé of the process than instruction. At 61 minutes across eleven short lessons, this plays more like a masterclass in thinking than a workshop in doing. There are no timed writing exercises, no peer review structure, and no worksheet walkthrough baked into the lessons themselves, even though one is included as a download. Anyone who already has a personal essay half-written and stuck will get real traction from the inward-outward framework and the boundary-setting advice. Anyone hoping to be walked from a blank page to a finished draft, step by step, will need to supply that structure themselves. The standout The craft-annotation exercise built around Ariel Levy's 'Thanksgiving in Mongolia,' which shows concretely how a working essayist reverse-engineers another writer's inward-outward balance and emotional control. ## What you will learn - · How to locate the specific purpose or 'why' behind an essay using the ethos, pathos, logos framework - · How to balance writing inward (personal experience) with writing outward (cultural context) so an essay doesn't read like a diary or a history lecture - · How to set and hold boundaries about what to reveal about yourself and the people in your life - · How to separate the essential truth of a memory from incidental details that don't need verifying - · How to structure a draft using narrative frames, vivid scenes, and a read-aloud revision pass - · How to research markets, write a one-line cover letter, and handle rejection when submitting to publications Best for: Writers who already have a story or draft in progress and want a working framework for shaping it into a publishable essay. Skip it if: Complete beginners who want structured writing prompts, in-class exercises, or line-by-line feedback on their own pages. Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Actionable Steps Helpful Examples [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fcreative-writing-crafting-personal-essays-with-impact%2F1709959838)