Personal Narrative:  Home Movies Not!

June 16, 2009

 

Mary Rosenblum:  Good morning all. Welcome to the Forum. I wanted to talk about personal narrative today, because it's such a great insertion point into the publishing world and because it uses most of the craft techniques of fiction. So, in my opinion, it's a lot more fun to write than informative NF. But there is a big gap between good narrative NF and not good narrative NF. The fact that the event really happened is a big reader-engagement point, but you can still bore readers.  So HOW you write that narrative is just as important as HOW you write that fiction story. That's why most editors want to see a personal narrative (personal essay) in complete form. They usually do not ask for a query first.
In an informative NF piece it's all about the idea...good writing is an expectation.  So it's query first most of the time. So what makes a good personal narrative as opposed to something more akin to one of those home movies that your Aunt Bertie bored the family reunions with?  Two key elements determine success --strong narrative voice and reader engagement.  You could describe the events of the famous ditching of the airliner in the Hudson in such a way that readers would yawn.  It's not all that hard to flatten the dramatic impact of events. All it takes is a boring description of events: this happened, then this happened, then this happened.
Essentially, that's what newspaper reporters are supposed to do: 'the facts, ma'am, only the facts'. They are supposedly forbidden from adding any personal tinting in any way. Although that line is a bit blurred these days!  But in a personal narrative that personal tinting is critical. If readers want the bare boned events, they'll read the newspaper. They want to be...first and foremost...entertained by your narrative.  And they want a real character, just as they do in fiction.
That's you. The author.
They want your reaction, your interpretation, your emotions. They want to share that moment with you. Not read the newspaper. That's what strong narrative voice is all about. You are revealing yourself as a real person, a friend who's telling us about this crazy thing that happened last night. And as readers engage with you as a real person, what you experienced, what you care about, becomes what they experience and what they care about.
Too often, novice narrative writers use a very spare, journalistic style. The facts ma'am, just the facts!  But if the event itself isn't something that readers want to find out about -- the ditching of the airliner, for example -- there's not much there to entertain them. And it's nothing that happened to anyone they know. Ho hum.
Now, nearly everybody assumes that all they have to do is write and their voice will shine through.  Well. Not always. Not usually, to be honest.  Whether it's all those years of writing constrained English class essays or a brain wiring issue, we tend to write quite differently than we talk.  But what you want, writing personal narrative, is exactly that. Write like you talk, and more importantly, write like a good storyteller talks.  Unless you naturally have a strong narrative voice...and few do...you need to adopt a slightly larger than life voice for your writing.  When you're talking to people in person, you use tone of voice to create dramatic tension, highlight important moments, convey emotion. You can't use tone of voice on the page, so you have to rely on word choice and rhythms in order to convey emotional rise and fall.  And you have to use word choices, syntax, and grammar in order to convey your personality. How do you want to come across to the readers?
Patrick McManus,who writes very funny hunting and outdoor narratives, does not talk in person the way he talks as a story teller.
[Mary Rosenblum ] 10:15 am: You want to add more drama to the page, to make up for the absence of body language and tone of voice.  Here's what I mean.
I have a cute little tricolor Australian Shepherd puppy and she likes to help me weed the garden. We spend many hours out in the garden together.
This is very bland. Information only. Let's see if I can add voice here.
Little did I know when I brought home that cute bundle of Australian Shepherd puppy last winter that I was acquiring my very own, self motivated chipper shredder. Come spring, Cricket discovered weeding. Well, I weed. She proceeds to turn the hapless dandelions and chickweed into impressively fine shreds of green stuff. Unfortunately, she seems to have no 'off’  switch.
So I've taken the basic information...my Aussie likes to help me weed, and I've added 'embroidery' to add entertainment value. Here's I've opted for humor.  I'm not conveying information, I'm trying to elicit a minds-eye picture in the readers' minds and give them something to smile at.  BUT...how will this not be a boring home movie about my puppy? They key there is in what I call 'universality'.
The readers might not have a puppy, might like dogs okay, but never will own a puppy. Sure this will connect pretty easily to dog lovers with their own versions of Cricket, but what about the rest? As I worked on this narrative, I'd make sure that it had some universal element that transcended my puppy in my yard.  It might be the whole idea of 'larger picture' say. Yeah, the puppy is a pain now, but she's going to grow into a really fine companion...I see the promise, so I keep my temper when she shreds the daffodils.   That can translate clearly to the parent of an annoying pre-teen., Yeah, I'd like to kill him, but he's going to grow up and turn into a good guy. It might be the new employee you're training.....she'll get the hang of it and it'll be worth my gray hairs.
So I've given my readers something to take away from this that might well suit their lives, even if they never ever own a puppy.  I've made the story larger than the home movie it might have been.
The temptation, especially when writing narratives about family events, is to be too specific. The narrative becomes about Aunt Celia's behavior and Uncle Carl's reaction.  Since most of your readers are related to neither Celia nor Carl, this isn't going to work outside the family.  But if you generalize a bit -- Aunt Celia's behavior is the behavior of a strong-willed old gal who won't admit that she can't remember anything past last Tuesday -- then the story becomes larger. Now it's a look at dealing with aging parents/grandparents and the frustrations and rewards of making it work out. An awful lot of readers will have had some experience of that kind and you're going to engage them personally and strongly. And it saves you from the huge editorial red flag of what I call 'axe grinding'. If the editor gets even a hint that you're writing this to punish Aunt Celia for messing up the family picnic, to ridicule her in public, you'll get a rejection slip so fast your head will spin.
Mary, What happens when you go too far, when personal narrative becomes a parody and it's not meant to be one?
Mary Rosenblum:  That's your task as writer, Jane, to keep it from becoming a parody. It’s going to depend on the tone you take, and to a large extent, assuming you're using first person or a strong narrative voice, you are going to set the tone for the piece. Respectful. Parody. Satire. Whatever.  It can be quite hard to write really good personal narrative.  Once you acquire your voice and 'get the hang' of it, it's pretty easy.  You really well develop a signature storytelling voice that will come to you automatically when you write personal narrative.
I'm getting the feeling that you need to keep your emotions in the front of your mind when you're choosing descriptive words and phrases for this type of writing?
Mary Rosenblum:  Yeah, Gary. You want to convey yourself as a character. Just as in fiction, we want a real person here, and that's you, the author.  In my dog example, I would work with my word choices to convey a tone of amused and fond frustration. I love my puppy, and I sure want to wring her neck at times. If I was writing a piece about my son's experiments with a potato cannon when he was 14, I'd work at conveying a sense of my eyes rolling, head shaking. Kids!  Much of how we evaluate character is through how a person speaks.
I think using the five senses is also important to help the reader experience being there with you,
Mary Rosenblum:  The five senses are always critical, Janet, in fiction and just as much, in narrative nonfiction. And to be honest, description is a consistent weakness in novice personal narratives. Why? Because you can see everything. Why bore the readers with details?
Of course, you readers only see a page until you make something appear. And you can't stop your narrative flow to fill us in on the picture unless that works for the narrative. If you're hiking, round a bend in the trail, and suddenly find yourself on a cliff looking out over the Pacific....yeah, that's a great place to describe in detail. But where you need the slipped-in details are as you're setting out and on the trail A mosquito bite here, a swipe at a sweaty neck there, the smell of pine sap as it gets hotter. Just a word here and there but consistently.
Mary, even though we are talking NF here, is it okay to change the name of that relative or that restaurant where the scene is set...to protect the innocent, the guilty and ourselves?
Lady, I would always change the name of the real people. I personally feel that it's not appropriate to put people up on the public stage. Now some people are probably fine with it, but it just bothers me.  Legally, as long as you do not libel someone, you're free to write anything you want.  Should you? Well, that's between you and your sense of ethics, I'd say.  I've certainly seen my share of student narratives that were vengeance pure and simple. And I've explained to those students that they're not saleable as they are.
But I have also known writers who have published humorous narratives that made a real person out as a buffoon or worse and I've seen how much it hurt the people who were the target, even though they had to laugh it off in public .
Even if it is loving and humorous I just don't like naming names.
Mary Rosenblum:  Legal does not always mean right.  I don't either, lady.  It can be daunting to think that thousands of strangers now know things about your life. I know that Alice Walker, (author of The Color Purple) writes about her family a lot and once gaily admitted that none of her family would speak to her for quite some time. I guess they made up eventually.
Tell-alls do seem pretty popular, and lucrative, unfortunately, at least the Hollywood and White House type.
Mary Rosenblum:  Well, Jane, that celebrity 'my movie star mom was a monster' are indeed very lucrative, Jane.  We do have a cult of celebrity and a lot of folk cash in on it.  But in the book market personal narrative tends to outsell fiction by an order of magnitude. We value the truth. A lot.  It simply needs to be entertaining, too. really top best sellers of their time -- Up the Down Staircase, by Kaufman (her teaching career in the NY public schools) and Peg Bracken’s many many books -- were all personal narratives.  Peg Bracken's books were all about life as a housewife in, I think, the late sixties and early seventies, and she wrote and sold many.
Where do you market personal narrative dog tales- pet mags, fam.reunions- genalogy mags?
Mary Rosenblum:  Ah yes...I started to talk about marketing and got sidetracked. You don't look for 'personal narrative' magazines. The few out there are read only by aspiring writers hoping to sell personal narratives to them. :-) Mostly.  Instead, look at your story. My Aussie story has a dog in it and gardening.  So I might send it off to GreenPrints, a magazine that features humorous essays that involve gardening.  I might send it off to one of the many dog magazines, maybe the magazine for Australian Shepherd owners.  If my neighbor's three year old was participating in the weed-shredding and gardening and my 'universal' was more about how young children and dogs learn from each other, I could then offer it to magazines with young parents as readers, too.  I would probably send a slightly different version to each of those markets. So the real keys to marketable personal narratives are a: Strong narrative voice and b: a universal that engages your readers.  The most common weakness I see, apart from weak narrative voice, is a lack of 'here and now' details -- visuals, sounds, scent, and so on. You don't want to drop in huge chunks of sensory detail, but weave it in subtly and constantly.
And you're free to send the mulit-slanted article to many markets and sell them separately as well, correct?
Mary Rosenblum:  Depends, Claryce, on just how different they are.  The gardening version and dog mag version would probably be similar enough that it would be hard to call them 'different'.  I could probably get away with the family magazine version with the neighbor's three year old involved at the same time I did the dog-only version to the garden/dog mags. it would be significantly different and I'd work at making it so. Personal narratives are a great way to break into the marketplace. Many of my students have made their first sale there. And they do help hone your fiction writing skills as well, nonfiction though they are.
Do editors consider personal narratives articles, or are they essays? For marketing purposes.
Mary Rosenblum:  They're called personal narratives, essays, personal essays pretty interchangeably.  There's not standardized dictionary of writing terms, Jane. Alas!  Oh yes, they're also called personal memoir or just memoir. You can get a headache keeping track of terms!
I guess what I mean is, when a magazine asks for articles, if they don't specify, are they asking for researched non-fiction, and not personal narrative?
Mary Rosenblum:  If they don't specify it's hard to know, Jane. But if you do your homework and look at the magazine, you should get a sense of what the editor is after. Guidelines don't really do that well.