The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

The first-person narrative is a powerful but also very difficult narrative form. It is powerful because you are intimate with the emotions and internal processes of the very real human being telling you the story; it is difficult because the rendering of that character has to be pitch-perfect for the reader to believe in her.

Works of imagination bleed together with the world they extrapolate from. The writing process begins in the writer, the life; it branches off onto paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader. There it hibernates, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversatio