Mary Rosenblum: Welcome to our After Hours Forum.   I'm going to talk about writing good personal narratives tonight.   Personal narrative is a popular form among novice writers and since it sells to the nonfiction market  it's a very good place to sell your work.  Essentially you combine the techniques of fiction with the reality of real life.  We LOVE truth, so it's quite popular.   However, it is one of the harder forms to do well, and very few novice writers know when they're not doing well.   The difficulty is that you know everything you're saying WAY too well.   You lived this story, you know these people. Everything you write is clear, obvious, and engaging.   It is VERY hard to divorce yourself from those words and read them like a reader reads them.   Your personality usually does not translate by osmosis onto the page.   You have to create yourself for your readers the same way that you create fictional characters for your readers   and  you have to create the scene, the here-and-now, just the way you have to create a fictional here-and-now.

 If you don't, you end up with a boring monotone and nothing much to look at. Alas that's the rule rather than the exception with novice personal narratives.  The tough part is that the author doesn't hear boring monotone and see nothing. You were THERE, so you see everything and you know yourself quite well!   Show, Don't Tell is just as critical in personal narrative as it is in a fiction story.  Don't tell your readers everything. Share those memories with them. Here's an example.  

I went to Grandma Bartin's for Thanksgiving, and it was just as weird and strange as I remembered. But cousin Marie had grown up and she took my breath away. After dinner, while everybody watched football on TV, I asked her to go for a walk with me. She wasn't real enthusiastic, it was pretty snowy, but she finally said yes.  

 So you have given your readers lots of information.  You know what? The encyclopedia is full of information and we mostly don't read them.  Unless we have to.  YOU see that dinner, smile to yourself over quirky Drunkle Uncle Dave, already tipsy before the first glass of wine.  But we don't.  Unless you show him to us.  So let's add the showing.  

I went to Grandma Bartin's for Thanksgiving. It was just like I remembered. Drunkle Uncle Dave was already talking too loud, the perennial glass of scotch in his hand. Aunt Wendy was knitting yet another puke-yellow sweater. And Bobby was sitting in the corner muttering.  The same fuschia pink and turquoise upholstery duked it out against orchid walls.  

 So now we have a sense of the people and a colorful glimpse of the house.  But wait!  We have no narrator. Not yet. He's just describing the folk that's all.  What is HE like?  We won't find out unless he reveals himself to us. How? The way we always reveal ourselves...through what we say and do.

  I went to Grandma Bartin's for Thanksgiving. Oh, man, every time I think I'm crazy, I just have to go home for the holidays. Then I realize just how normal I am! It's like noon and Dave, the drunkle uncle, is already staggering. Scotch this year. Used to be cheap wine, but his 401K is doing better. And Aunt Wendy was working on another puke-yellow sweater. Or maybe it's the same one and she just unravels it when it's done.  

Now we're adding the MC's personality, his personal feelings about his relatives that also reveal him to us.

Charie': How do you present the dialogue? Is it first person POV or can it be third?

Mary Rosenblum: Charie, dialogue is tough in first person narrative like this.  It's a good idea to keep it to a minimum.

Charie': So internal dialogue mostly?

Mary Rosenblum: Charie you can use dialogue, I would not use a huge amount of it, and do remind the readers that the narrator is telling us this story.

Muleskinner:  So give us an example of how to transition to dialog.

Erika:  How well does first person narrative usually do in the market?

Mary Rosenblum: Erika it's a bigger market than fiction. Depends on how engaging your narrative is.

Okay, dialogue..  Let's let our narrator hit on his coz.

Then Marie shows up, and all of a sudden I forgive all my relatives for everything. Wow, has she grown up to be something. What happened to the skinny kid with braces who tagged after me all the time and drove me crazy? Woohoo!  "Hey, coz." I sidle up, trying not to drool. "Long time no see."  

"Derrick, hey." She grins and all of a sudden, she's that kid all over again. "I didn't know you were going to be here." And she throws her arms around me.   You know, I’m really glad I came all of a sudden. Don't give me that look. She's not really my cousin, you know. Aunt Mindy and Uncle Bert adopted her, so there.

Now this is a technique you don't see a lot but it can be quite effective.  The narrator carries on an implied conversation with the readers.   Our narrator is talking to the readers, but the implication is that the readers are disapproving.  So he is answering their reaction.

Speck:  But doesn't that author intrusion tend to distance the reader from the story?

Mary Rosenblum: That's true in third person, speck.  This is a first person narrative. The author (or fictional character) can speak directly to the readers.  In personal narrative you ARE speaking to the readers.  Same thing in first person POV in fiction. Your character is speaking to the readers.  it's very effective. Some of the really excellent narrative writers, like Patrick McManus, create that 'it's just you and me and I’m telling you this story' intimacy very very well.

Muleskinner:   So if the author is speaking to the readers, when he made that statement who is he talking to?

Rae:  this is why 1st person is so hard, but when it is done correctly, it is so good.

Mary Rosenblum:: He's talking to the readers, mule. He' s suggesting that readers are giving him 'that look'.   Exactly, rae.  You need to create yourself as a character, even though you're a real person. :-) Real person does not automatically translate to the page.   This speaking to the readers, Mule, is a bit of a double edged sword. If your readers feel as if the author's comments are positive, they're drawn in. If the narrator seems to be looking down on them or sneering...trouble!  It's a technique to try cautiously.   This is an author talking. He's not thinking this. He's simply talking to the readers all the way through.   Personal narrative is storytelling only on paper instead of on the back porch at the family reunion.  Just as you tell the story to the family, you tell the story to the readers.

Rae:  You can't really have thinking in 1st person narrative. or can you?

Mary Rosenblum:  Not 'direct thought' Rae. It's VERY clunky if you try it. Your narrator is telling a story. So if he thinks something, he's going to tell us about that.

Muleskinner:   I guess you can say I thought to myself I'm glad my uncle had to adopt

Mary Rosenblum:  Yeah, you can. You don't want to do it too often.  After all, if you're telling the readers why mention that you thought it to yourself. That CAN work, but only in certain contexts. Like this.  

I'm sitting across the table from her and thinking that I am so glad I turned down Pamela's invite to that stuffy family dinner with her brother's family.   Here, he's still talking to us readers but he tells us that he was thinking in a certain situation.  That tends to be used more often if you're using present tense, as I just did above.   Now this does not work in personal narrative. There, you're always talking about a real life event and that had to have happened in the past, unless you're talking about writing the personal narrative.  So you probably won't use present tense.  Past is easiest. We're used to reading stories written in past tense. Most are.   If Derrick is telling us about his last Thanksgiving dinner with his family, it's probably going to be in past tense.   After all...this is last Thanksgiving. Not today.  Now you can use present tense within past in personal narrative.   You can do a sort of 'flashback' in personal narrative.  Like this.  

 We set up deer camp at the top of Cooper Canyon. We do this camp there every year and I have a lot of fond memories that go way back. And, uh, some not so fond memories. LIke the time Charley invited his friend James along. I remember like it was yesterday. I"m sitting there in camp, thawing out after four hours on the stand in what felt like subzero cold, and he sneaks up behind me and dumps ice cubes down my neck.  But James didn't get invited back after that, so I didn't have to kill him. Anyway, this November it was just Gus, Charley, Mooney, and me.

Muleskinner:   that sounds like all present tense

Mary Rosenblum:  So I went from past tense to the present tense of the flashback, and back to the past tense of the narrative.   The first and last sentences are in past tense, transitioning from a past tense narrative to the present of the here-and-now memory, then back to the past tense again.  The only reason I did that was to make that reminiscence 'stand out' from the rest of the narrative to make it clear to readers that it is not happening in the same time frame as the rest of the narrative.   The big danger is that your readers will get confused and think James is there in deer camp with them now.   So if he slips into first person to tell about James and his ice cubes, it sort of sets that section apart.  It's all about creating the effect of talking to the readers personally...while not confusing 'em!  You listen to how people tell stories and you create that effect when you write personal narrative.   You have to set that voice in your head to make that happen. I like it for first person fiction.  If  you're writing it only for the family members and everybody knows everybody in the story, you don't need to create any characters. They know 'em. If  you're writing for strangers, you have to create 'em.   

 One thing about nonfiction. Readers tend to think of the 'I' voice as being 'true' and third person as being 'fiction'.  Even when it is not.   I often council students writing family stories in third person to change it to first.  Then there’s the 'frame'.  That is, you start out telling us about sitting yourself down to listen to grandpa's story, then transition into Grandpa telling the story, using third person, and at the end, bring us back to the first person here and now again.  A frame is when the 'here and now' that starts the story ends quickly and the main story is really a flashback or what have you. At the end of the story, the narrator or main character brings us back to the original 'here and now'. Like this:

I walked down to the Black Bear for my usual Friday night pint. Harley was there and already half lit. "Hey, George," he yelled at me, slopping bear all over the bar. "You gotta hear this."   Well he's a good story teller, so I collected my pint and sat down next to him.  

 "I was up in Sothby's woods last Tuesday." He sucked foam off his lip. "And I figured that I'd better take the shortcut home. The old gal gets mad at me when I get in too late. So I'm walking fast 'cause it's darker than a tinker's hat and...

 And you go on with Harley's story. And the end, you transition back to the Black Bear and George's voice again.  

 We all laughed, but I felt this kind of creepy cold in my gut. I had to walk home past the old graveyard. I looked at the clock, finished my pint.  "You leavin' early?" Harley was waving for another. "You gettin' sick?"

 "Yeah." I laid my money on the bar. It never occurred to me that Harley might have been on that path that night. "I'll see you tomorrow."  

 That's a frame. We start with George, we get Harley's story, and we end with George.   Well, hopefully this has made personal narrative a bit clearer.  You really have the same goals as you do in fiction...characterization, reader engagement. You're just limited to telling the truth.