1) To convey a dynamic nonfiction narrative, one must build oneself into a character on the page
The problem with I is not that it is in bad taste but that fledgling personal essayist and memoirists may think they have conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable. In their minds, that I swarms with a lush, sticky past and an almost fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time in a new piece of writing sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on. Even the barest I holds a whisper of promised engagement but doesn’t give a clear picture of who is speaking. To give that picture you must build yourself into a character. We turn ourselves into characters every day, of course. At the job interview, the cocktail party, and the family Thanksgiving dinner, we may turn ourselves into three different characters. Turning yourself into a character in your writing requires the understanding that you can never project your whole self. You must be able to pick yourself apart.
–Phillip Lopate, “The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character,” from Telling True Stories (2007)
2) A story should, in part, be about how the person chooses to tell it
“The fact that a character in the story is telling the story should be part of what the story is ultimately about (and this not necessarily part of the character’s consciousness). Ask what a work loses if changed out of first person, and if the only answer is anything like “it loses an engaging voice”—if the work hasn’t lost anything from what it was ultimately about—then first person isn’t being used to its complete potential. Few examples are as obvious as imagining Lolita without it being Humbert’s “confession.” It becomes a sensational TV movie about pedophilia.”
–Cris Mazza, The Writer’s Chronicle, October/November 2009
3) Witnessing an event should reveal the subjective POV of the witness
The traditional trick of literature is to obscure the writer, to express the story through a fabricated narrator describing a fabricated reality. But for me, what I have to say is validated by the fact that I was there, that I witnessed the event. There is, I admit, a certain egoism in what I write, always complaining about the heat or the hunger or the pain I feel, but it is terribly important to have what I write authenticated by its being lived. You could call it, I suppose, personal reportage, because the author is always present. I sometimes call it literature by foot.”
–Ryszard Kapuściński, interviewed by Bill Buford in Granta 21
4) The “I” on the page need not always synch with the “I” in real life
I never feel like the “I” that’s speaking in a piece of mine has any real duty to sync up with whatever Me is on a given day, in terms of sensibility. If I can create an entity on the page, a being with a voice, who’s able to look at things in a way that gets me closer to what’s true about them, then I embrace him, even if he ends up saying things I don’t say. You can’t do it with other people, of course. If you didn’t actually say the heat was miserable when we were riding the bus together, I can’t quote you as saying that in my piece. But the creature who writes under my byline gets to feel hot and miserable and tell you about it, and the fact-checkers have no way to check it, except to verify that it was 98 degrees in El Paso that day. I’m saying it’s one thing we get as nonfiction writers. You know, fiction writers get a lot. They can do anything. We can’t do that much, but we can play with masks, and they can’t take that away.
–John Jeremiah Sullivan
5) Like comedians do, writers must create a kind of narrative persona
Comedians spend a lot of time and effort perfecting their “shtick” – their stage persona, the “character” they do in their set. But there’s often a large space between this performed public persona and the private person. Louis CK, the TV show, is a show about this, among other things. It is a show about what it would be be like were Louis CK’s stage persona an actual person in the world. But a fun part of the show is that while the “offstage” Louis of the show is actually the fictionalized onstage persona of the actual Louis CK – we never do get to see IRL Louis, a guy who stars in a show about his sad-sack stage persona. Yet we are shown Sarah Silverman and Chris Rock playing themselves in a way that points to the complicated gaps and continuities between their private personalities and stage personas. And writers do this, too, just like comedians – they create personae, and these personae write, which is to say, perform books. The sensibility of a book is the sensibility of the IRL writer’s authorial persona. That’s what an “implied author” is – a performed persona of the author.
–Will Wilkinson, “Narrative Persona in Nonfiction,” January 19, 2014
6) Stories of embarrassment, when told honestly, are always entertaining
Often, when writing creative nonfiction, students have trouble finding the significance of events from their own lives, partly because they are protecting some image of themselves. Stories of embarrassment are entertaining (when they work) because the teller allows himself to play the fool — that’s the given. Often that makes for insightful and engaging prose for at least two reasons: (1) something usually happens when you get embarrassed, often something funny, and (2) the storyteller becomes interested in juxtapositions, wild inconsistencies, and ironies, rather than ‘lessons’ or pristine portraits of themselves.”
–Rene Steinke, “A Past Embarrassment,” Now Write! Nonfiction (2009)
7) Writing becomes untrue when you hew to projection and perception rather than complexity
I knew a girl who wanted to be perceived as good, or a boy who wanted to be perceived as bad, or sexy, or rebellious, or nobody’s fool, or somebody’s fool, or innocent, or guilty, and people are often very attached. This is the armature of yourself that you present to the world, but it’s not particularly true, and the writing becomes untrue when you’re trying to write to shelve that up. …I always ask myself: Am I trying to defend some part of myself? With Lit, I initially wrote my ex-husband very perfectly, because I didn’t want to seem like someone who was bitter at her son’s father. But we got divorced for a reason. We fought, and I had to put that in. So I put myself as very bad and him as very good, and then I put him as very bad and me as very good, and then somehow I realized that what I was afraid of writing was how much in love we’d been, which wasn’t that long a scene. It was a few pages, but until the reader had that information, the other material wouldn’t ring true.
–Mary Karr
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