Your Life As Story:
Narrative Non Fiction Like A Novel

I write this month from Colorado Springs where I have traveled to the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Tradeshow to promote my book, Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir, for St. Martin's Press.

What I had confirmed for me at that Tradeshow was exactly what I have known for some time, and I pass it on again because I am even more painfully aware of how essential it is to the successful completion of your dream. Personal stories--memoir, autobiography, essays, travel writing, all of which are forms of narrative nonfiction--will struggle to make it into print if they do not tell a story that does the same thing a good novel does:

1) They must present a narrator about whom we (the readers) care enough so that we are willing to go on a journey (the journey of the book) with that person; and

2) That person, our intrepid narrator, needs to take us, in that journey, to a place we've never been before.     

It doesn't matter that we are not writing fiction. We narrative nonfiction writers must learn from our cousins the fiction writers and give readers the core experience of a piece of fiction: a story that engages the reader and shows him a new way of looking at the world.

We need to make the narrator a person the reader cares about deeply.

Watch next month for the beginning of a series of articles tackling this topic of voice in Narrative Nonfiction from a variety of angles.