Your Life As Story:
Writing Narrative Nonfiction
Following the Passion

That’s why I call them Shimmering Images. I swear the energy of the story, which is just holding its breath waiting for you to pay attention to it, sends out subtle shimmer (It’s trying to get your attention!), and if you squint when you look at that memory, if you really pay attention to it--not just let it float by like the 101 other times in your life that memory has shown up and floated by--you will sense that energy, see the shimmering story poised within grasp.

Last night as I worked with my earnest group of writers, I sent them into a ten-minute exploration, on paper, of one of those images. They stared at me blankly for a moment--put to work on a Friday evening on a vacation that’s meant to be soothing!--but soon enough they were scribbling furiously, hands racing across the page.

When we finished the writing exercise last night, one young woman shot her hand into the air.

“Why I couldn’t believe it,” she said her eyes big, round and honest. I wrote about an encounter I had in a restaurant years ago...it affected me profoundly, but....”

“You’ve never forgotten it,” I said.

“No, never.”

“And did you discover why you’ve never forgotten it when you wrote this?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice rising at the end. “Yes, I can’t believe it.”

That’s where the good stories hang out, and that’s why all those little memory-pictures, those Shimmering Images, have come back all these years. They are guideposts to your most passionate responses to life.

And that, of course, is what writing Narrative Nonfiction is all about: Living passionately, and then writing about it.