The answer will change, depending on the kind of story you’re telling.įind the balance between saying too little and TMI.īalancing the tendency to say too little about yourself with the purge of dumping too much information (TMI) is a challenge in personal storytelling. That’s a good question and one you should keep asking yourself. Expressing self-awareness about how much life changes over time also strengthens your voice. Your voice is not a Platonic ideal, but a record of lived experience. Much of what determines a first-person voice is the quality of those observed details. Yet what the writer chooses to observe affects the details included from story to story. A strong first-person voice has a consistent tone and style. Shouldn’t my first-person voice be consistent? Honest personal stories acknowledge these changing views. Our thoughts and feelings resemble a flow of experience and observations more than one true self. In “Six Views of Yourself,” you’ll experiment with presenting different aspects of your “I” in a description.
The previous lesson introduces the value of self-reflection in finding your first-person voice. How does this lesson build on the previous lesson? That’s the start of finding your first-person voice, and it will take you beyond name, rank, and identity label. When writing, consider which view of yourself matters in telling a particular story. I don’t mean we’re all walking around with multiple personalities, but we play various roles in our lives, such as child, parent, employee, teacher, or friend. “In their minds, that I may be swimming with background and a lush, sticky past and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time in a new piece sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on.” In To Show and to Tell, Phillip Lopate’s essay collection about nonfiction craft, he points out that novice writers using “I” tend to “think they’ve said or conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable.” Lopate continues: Facts are facts, but they rarely ring with the individual sound of your voice. We’re often called on to fill in factual information about ourselves, whether applying for a job, in a doctor’s office, or writing a biographical note.
Who are you? It may seem obvious, until you try to describe your “I.” In this lesson, you’ll play with various views of who you are, becoming more aware of how your first-person voice can shift and flex.įor example, note how I introduced myself in this book.
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