By Herbert Hadad

I had been teaching personal-essay writing for about ten years when the girl with the peanut up her nose joined my class.

The class met in the evening, and she was a teenager, so her dad joined, too. She was eager to write about that time she put a nut in her nostril on a dare from her brother, then couldn't get it out. She and her father thought her essay was hilarious. They also thought it was literature.

"It is obvious you have a lively mind," I told her, as eight or nine other students ranging in age from twentyish to seventy-something listened closely. "And this is an amusing anecdote. But it's more a brief for an ear-nose-throat journal than a personal essay. Please try something else."

Though daughter and father hung in there for a few more weeks, they never really recovered from the early rebuff. Actually, they'd posed more of a challenge than they probably realized. One of the hardest parts of conducting a writing workshop is maintaining honesty—both yours and the student's—without inflicting unnecessary harm.

Sometimes, you're there to encourage as a student wrestles with the truth. A courtly man in his eighties wrote an essay about being a twelve-year-old in suburban New York City. As he read it to the class, it was clear he knew he had matters to resolve before his days were over.

His father, he wrote, had disappeared one day. His mother's explanation: Dad is sick in a hospital. Rumors circulated in the neighborhood. The other kids were not kind. "Your father went crazy," they razzed him. "Your father's in the nuthouse."

"One Sunday," my student wrote, "my mother said to put on my best clothes—we were going to visit Dad. We drove for about a half hour, and the car pulled up to a place with high stone walls and a tower. A man with a shotgun stared down at us. It was Sing Sing. My dad was in jail." Inside those walls, the family had a loving reunion, and the father explained that he'd been framed for an embezzlement at the bank that employed him. A few years later, the dad was released from prison and went on with his life.

The story was cathartic, and the writer was eager for comment. "It's a beautiful, touching story," I told him, and urged him to try to get it published.

But my student confessed his demons had not yet completely vanished. "My cousin knew I was writing this story," he told me, "and he said, ‘Oh, Samuel, why do you have to shame and embarrass the family after all this time?'"

"Tell him to mind his own business," I advised, delivering the brief lecture I've given fledgling writers many times. "Family members are usually not friendly to your personal writing; they have their own agendas and concerns. With few exceptions, I urge you not to show your work to them."

My writing classes are eight-week sessions held at a cultural center in a converted train station overlooking the Hudson River. Almost every student begins by asking what a personal essay is. Here, in part, is how my class description defines it: "The essay offers the opportunity to express, in a short and conversational form, the whole range of thoughts and feelings, from intimacy and grief, to joy and epiphany. [It] allows for the most satisfying and polished examination of ideas, beliefs, troubles, and pleasures."

I don't lecture much, but I do tell students that an essay's essential components are the exposition, the conflict, the climax, and the denouement. The peanut story, for instance, wasn't going anywhere. But the son of the incarcerated man made a real journey, from innocence to experience.

All kinds of people sign up for the class—doctors, professors, teachers, homemakers, taxi drivers, firefighters. Many like to talk more than write. "It's got to be on paper," I'm often obliged to say. "Otherwise, we're not a writing workshop—we're a group-therapy session."

Many students are discovering themselves as they write. One young woman described peering out her window late at night and watching her boyfriend pass under a streetlight and disappear. "Your essay is wonderfully written, but there's one problem," I told her. "I can't tell whether you wanted him to leave or not."

She smiled. "Neither can I," she said.

Some people have limited talent; others are restless. All are paying a substantial amount to be in class. A retired lawyer with a wealth of interesting tales would breeze through his initial draft, then go on to another idea rather than rewrite.

Another writer had a haunting story that required effort to tell. When she was a girl, her father kept in the cellar a large locked chest, which he wouldn't discuss. Many years later, the woman went with her husband and children to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C.

"I looked up at this gigantic photograph," she wrote, "and it was my father in his Army overseas cap. He had just helped liberate a concentration camp." She described the unbearable pain on his face. She knew, finally, what wrenching memorabilia the chest must have contained.

When you lead a workshop, you pray your students will be talented and work well together, for then the sessions are a joy. One such group arrived last winter. They included a semiretired professor of sociology, a platform- tennis champion and composer of New York Times crosswords, and an accomplished poet. The mutual support in that class was delightful. The sociologist was writing a book about his experiences among the poor of Puerto Rico, and every sentence he wrote was polished like a jewel, thanks to his fellow students' attention.

The class also included a middle-aged woman with an endearingly quirky take on the world. Everyone marveled at her short essays, including one that described how digging a hole in her garden had opened up a universe of experiences. Though we helped her compose cover letters, she never submitted a story to a magazine.

On the other hand, a mother in an earlier class dashed off a charming piece about getting her little son ready for his school picture. I suggested a few places where it might be appreciated, and she was a star for a while after the New York Times published it.

If writing is a journey, one woman's story was literally about a journey. Acting on a lifelong desire, she had built a dory and sailed it down the Hudson. Her essay, filled with telling asides of her excitement and misgivings about the project, was like her boat, well-constructed and sturdy. At one point in the story, she almost drowns; her account of her realization and acceptance of the voyage's dangers was unforgettable.

Since writers often succumb to shopworn expressions, I always establish a Cliche Patrol in my classes. When a cliché is spotted, anyone in the class may shoot it down and suggest an alternative. The Patrol replaces the sting of saying someone's writing is lazy.

I have no formal teaching credentials. I learned how to run a writing workshop by taking one given by Mary Cheever, a poet and writer, and the wife of the late novelist and short-story writer John Cheever. She liked my stories about my family, whom she asked to meet. She came to the house for dinner, and we became friends. Once I began teaching, I was merely imitating Mary when I told students, "There is nothing wrong with your writing. It's merely a matter of finding the editor who appreciates it."

Some people come to class with their heart on their sleeve, like the doctor who had just lost his wife. Others arrive reluctant to reveal themselves, like the NYPD detective who hid behind the third-person until I said, "We all know that's you in the precinct house, and in the bar, and on the street at night under the elevated. So get comfortable, and switch to first-person."

I like to think I've helped a handful of writers. I know all my students have taught me. There is a popular expression: Those who can, do; those who can't, teach. It couldn't be more wrong. Teaching tests your mettle just as much as writing does. You can't be a phony and succeed at either.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and author of the forthcoming essay collection Home Fires, has taught essay writing for the past fifteen years at the Hudson Valley Writers' Center, in Sleepy Hollow, New York.