The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
I used these definitions, drawn in part from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation And The Story. The personal essay was the attempt to make sense of a topic using experiences and research, sometimes taken from life experience and sometimes not. The memoir was the attempt to understand the self in relationship to a time period or a topic generated out of
... See moreAll novels, short stories, and plays, and most poems, are about human transformation. The subject of the novel is the human spirit and psyche—how the characters interact in their relationships with other souls and with the world in general.
Walter Mosley • This Year You Write Your Novel
The story is the way the story is told.
Ursula K. Le Guin • The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination
There are dozens of ways to break up the narrative even in the first person. But everything flows through the consciousness of this narrator, so you must be true to that voice.