The You That’s Not You: Why You Need a Persona to Write Good Essays
The top 3 lessons I learned about writing personal narratives from Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story.
At the beginning of this year, I created a sort of creative nonfiction writing syllabus for myself. I wanted to get better at writing personal narratives. So, I treated the entire endeavor as if I was taking a college course on it. As a recent graduate, this was familiar to me and what I understood to be the best way to learn.
Anyways, one of the books on that list was Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story which was published in 2001.
If you’re also someone who is just getting into writing personal narratives, then I highly suggest you pick up this book. It is broken into two parts: the essay and the memoir. In this post, I want to discuss the biggest lessons I learned from part one of this book.
Lesson 1: You don’t have a story if you don’t know who is telling it. “Because the narrator knew who was speaking, she always knew why she was speaking.”
The storytelling plays a huge role in how and why the story is told. Change the storyteller and you’re effectively changing the story altogether.
Think of it this way: If you write about your first kiss at sixteen, the story is going to be different if you write from the perspective of your sixteen-year-old self versus your older, much wiser thirty-something-year-old self. The story would change even more if you write it from the perspective of someone heartbroken compared to the perspective of someone in the midst of first love. What would the narrative arc read like then?
This is where persona comes in. When writing a personal narrative, your persona needs to aid the story in some way. Depending on the theme or idea you’re trying to convey to your reader, the persona you adopt for the narrator needs to service that larger theme.
When you don’t know who is telling the story, how could you possibly know what the story is about? Or why you’re telling it in the first place? Perspective adds clarity to a personal narrative.
Lesson 2: A certain level of detachment is necessary to avoid confessional or “navel-gazing” writing. “Inevitably, the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required.”
At one point, Gornick refers to writers self-investigating themselves through the essay form as “purposeful innerliness” which I love.
Writing about yourself doesn’t inherently mean self-obsession or that the writing reads like a diary entry. In order to avoid this, you need a bit of distance between you and the story you’re sharing. That could mean time in between when it happened and when you’re writing about it. Or it could mean accepting the events that happened to you.
When you’ve detached, you’re able to see that past version of yourself in all your faults and virtues. You don’t reduce yourself into a one-dimensional villain or hero.
Lesson 3: There’s the situation and then, there’s the story. “The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.”
Gornick explains this pretty well in her own words so I don’t have much to add on. I will say that this distinction helped to clarify my own issues with personal narrative.
Sometimes I would have the situation but no reason for telling this story. Or, I would have the story, the insight, but I didn’t have the situation. So, it would come across as preach-y and shallow. You need both to tell a moving and humanizing story. Develop both the situation and the story and you’ll have a personal narrative that readers won’t soon forget.
