The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of at the time that we are reading.

In each case the writer was possessed of an insight that organized the writing, and in each case a persona had been created to serve the insight.

The unsurrogated narrator has the monumental task of transforming low-level self-interest into the kind of detached empathy required of a piece of writing that is to be of value to the disinterested reader.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.

For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life.

The question clearly being asked in an exemplary memoir is “Who am I?” Who exactly is this “I” upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.

I began to read the greats in essay writing—and it wasn’t their confessing voices I was responding to, it was their truth-speaking personae.

It is this sympathy that creates a dynamic in writing, the one necessary to stimulate internal movement.

Modern memoir posits that the shaped presentation of one’s own life is of value to the disinterested reader only if it dramatizes and reflects sufficiently on the experience of “becoming”: undertakes to trace the internal movement away from the murk of being told who you are by the accident of circumstance toward the clarity that identifies accurat