Your Life As Story:
Writing Narrative Nonfiction
Crafting A Narrative From Life Experience -- Part I

A first and simple step to combat this problem is to begin your story as follows: Start with an event after which everything was different, some event that changed the course of your life. And I¹ll bet there are a bunch of them. Some are big and unpleasant, some are smaller and more subtle. Just be very clear that the path you walked after the event went in a new direction. (Sometimes you can only see that new direction from the long view of hindsight.)

Much of contemporary memoir goes for sensationalism--the bigger more unpleasant events--and that choice has a lot to do with the marketplace. But quieter stories can be far more rewarding, both for writer and reader:

• dealing with job loss
• helping an aging parent
• starting a business
• building a boat
• creating a garden from ravaged ground

Heck! the list is as endless as life experience. Simply look for events that have changed you. Change is important, because it implies dynamism, and dynamism is what stories are about, characters acting to deal with change.

The events from your life after which everything was different don't need to be death, divorce, or the affects of drugs and alcohol on a family system, but they can be. Big changes imply big stuff to deal with, and that can make a good story.

A way to get started crafting a narrative from life experience is to spend some time reviewing your life and making a simple list, like a grocery list, of these events. They then become potential beginning points; each event represents the possible beginning of a separate memoir.

The body of the story becomes the journey the narrator (you, the hero of your story) goes on to come to terms with that event.

It's that simple!

Next month, with June's column, I'll continue this discussion with how you craft a narrative, after you have chosen one of those life-altering events as the beginning of your memoir.