The Journey from Self-Conscious to Aware
The other evening I taught a lesson at the Loft that was meant to help beginning memoirists distinguish between the character and the narrator in their stories. We create personas for ourselves on the page; the main character in every memoir is the younger self who experiences and is changed by events; we can also portray ourselves as a narrator looking back on these events. For writers who assume the “I” on the page is also the living, breathing self, the lesson was tough. Brows furrowed, baffled questions were asked, small groups struggled to figure out which “I” was which, and despair settled everywhere. I’ve observed this happen whenever I teach some element of craft. Say I reflect on the value of using sensory details; suddenly my students are overly conscious about not using sensory details and assume they’ve failed, or their writing grows ridiculously burdened with sensory details and…