Draft is a series about the art and craft of writing.

When Kenan, the Bosnian physical therapist treating my back injury, saw me grading student papers between leg lifts, he asked, “What I did on my summer vacation?”

I told him that, actually, the first piece I assign my feature journalism classes is something a little more revealing: write three pages confessing your most humiliating secret.

“You Americans.” He laughed. “Why would anyone reveal that?”

“Because they want to publish essays and sell memoirs,” I said.

During my next session, Kenan handed me 900 words chronicling his Muslim family’s betrayal by their neighbors during the Balkan War. It led to his first clip and a second career.

Over 20 years of teaching, I have made “the humiliation essay” my signature assignment. It encourages students to shed vanity and pretension and relive an embarrassing moment that makes them look silly, fearful, fragile or naked.

You can’t remain removed and dignified and ace it. I do promise my students, though, that through the art of writing, they can transform their worst experience into the most beautiful. I found that those who cried while reading their piece aloud often later saw it in print. I believe that’s because they were coming from the right place — not the hip, but the heart.

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The author Phillip Lopate complains that the problem with confessional writing is that people don’t confess enough. And I agree. The biggest mistake new writers make is going to the computer wearing a three-piece suit. They craft love letters about their wonderful parents, spouses, children and they share upbeat anecdotal slices of life. This rarely inspires brilliance or self-insight. Drama, conflict and tension are more compelling, especially when the piece starts with your “I” narrator about to fall off a cliff (metaphorically, of course). It’s counterintuitive, but qualities that make you likable and popular in real life — good looks, wild success, happy marriage, lovely home, healthy confidence — will make a reader despise you. The more of a wreck you are from the start, the more the audience is hooked.

But remember, a litany of bitterness will not suffice. My rule for first person nonfiction is: question, challenge and trash yourself more than anyone else. My favorite essays begin with emotional devastation and conclude with surprising metamorphosis. This is why true stories of failure, addiction, breakups, financial ruin and recovery are so intriguing.

Editors and agents who’ve spoken to my university classes set a high bar for the work they take: “I have to fall in love.” (The second most popular standard — in New York, at least — is “I have to be so engrossed I miss my subway stop.”) Sharing internal traumas on page one makes you immediately knowable, lovable and engrossing.

On the first page of the classic “Angela’s Ashes,” Frank McCourt confesses: “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood… is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood,” and then hints of the alcohol, abuse, poverty, fire and parental abandonment ahead. In the opening of “The Glass Castle,” Jeanette Walls is in a taxi worried she’s overdressed for a Manhattan event when she catches her homeless mother digging through a dumpster. Jimmy Breslin’s “I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me” begins with the columnist in the hospital, being wheeled into brain surgery, petrified he’ll lose his memory, his ability to work and even his life. When we are privy to gut-wrenching secrets like these up front, we’re dying to find out more, to go on an internal journey that offers vicarious pain, thrills and wisdom.

While I can adeptly elicit my students’ neediness and neuroses, it can be hard to find the right balance of humiliation and humility myself. “I detest this woman. She’s a rich, white, ambitious urbanite with a nice husband, but she’s flirting with her ex-boyfriend. I want to slap her,” proclaimed a colleague in my writing workshop after I’d read the first chapter of my memoir-in-progress “Five Men Who Broke My Heart.” The worst part of his critique: He was right.

I was attempting to chronicle my mid-life crisis when, as a married 40-year-old journalist, I re-met my top five heartbreaks. I assumed that admitting in public that I’d been dumped five times in the title made me sufficiently pathetic. But early on, I wasn’t weak, vulnerable or relatable. I came across as flippant and cavalier instead of as someone who was hurting; the stakes weren’t high enough. In short, I hadn’t dug deep enough into my real anxiety. I hadn’t weaved in answers to the dramatic questions the playwright David Mamet insists must permeate every page: Who wants what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now?

The revision of my memoir revealed much sooner that my “heartbreak journey” came during my “no book, no baby” summer, after I’d received two terrible faxes the same day. In one, my gynecologist confirmed my infertility. In the second, my agent reported that the book I’d struggled with for seven years had been rejected everywhere. “It felt like she was saying ‘the only baby you have is ugly, we don’t want it,’” I wrote.

“You buried the lede,” another journalist said, explaining that I’d hidden the most timely, significant and explosive elements in my earlier draft. “Now I see she’s desperate. I get her motivation.”

“We need to worry you’re not O.K.,” an empathetic female memoirist told me.

After I coughed up my deepest dismay, my memoir found a good editor and good reviews (except from the male columnist from Texas who still felt sorry for my husband).

I was recently worried that, as a still happily married middle-age professor, it might be time to stop making a fool of myself on the page. Then I realized the most fascinating new character I can’t get enough of is the bipolar C.I.A. agent Carrie Mathison from the Showtime show “Homeland.” She is a walking emotional disaster I adore and identify with, even when she’s getting electroshock therapy or sleeping with a spy she suspects is a terrorist.

To update a quote by the 19th century poet Matthew Arnold, “Journalism is literature with ADD.” You have to grab the reader by the throat immediately, which is why I launched my second memoir with the line “In December my husband stopped screwing me.” I actually learned my penchant for provocation by studying postmodern poetry. There’s a clear trajectory from confessional poems to personal essays to the memoir genre (that’s why poets like Mary Karr, Charles Simic, Katha Pollitt and Nick Flynn have published poignant memoirs.) The stark, painful, inappropriate confession is the most essential part, the meat and potatoes, the soul and the sound bite, the raison d’être.

This brings me to my one caveat: while readers will applaud your brave, tumultuous disclosures, your relatives won’t. The first piece you write that your family hates means you found your voice, I warn my classes. If you want to be popular with your parents and siblings, try cookbooks.

Growing up in Midwestern Jewish suburbia (where if you say anything bad about yourself or your clan, the Cossacks will come get you), I felt awkward, alone and misunderstood. Then my high school English teacher turned me on to traumatized, intensely self-exposing confessional poetry.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Robert Lowell, who was known for his stark confessions, once wrote: “I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.”

Not really. Decades after his death I’m still reading — and quoting — him.

Susan Shapiro is the author of nine first-person books, including three memoirs her family hates: “Five Men Who Broke My Heart,” “Lighting Up” and “Only as Good as Your Word” and the co-author of the upcoming memoir “The Bosnia List.”