Because there were so many disparate messages and bits of advice in our reading for the week, I am going to focus on one story in particular to ground my discussion. Phillip Lopate's "The Personal Essay and the First-Person Character" was a useful article on the multifaceted nature of the word "I" in a personal essay. Lopate begins by acknowledging the importance and basic need for a writer to use the word when writing about one's self. The problem is not in the usage of the word but rather in the assumed weight it carries. Lopate says in page 78, "I swarms with a lush, sticky past and an almost fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time in a new piece of writing sees only a slender telephone pole." What Lopate is saying is one must build up this "I" with specific details that distinguish the first person in the narrative. This resonated with me because I will often drop an "I" in a personal essay and assume it says more than it really does.
To remedy this problem, Lopate suggests we strengthen our work with conflict. Through conflict an original narrator is born. Conflict in a story has the potential to both test the narrator and cause specific details about one's life to be revealed. To fully achieve this status of well-rounded narrator, one must distance one's self from the writing in order to better understand how the reader will view your work.
Lopate's article was a useful tool for sharpening my first-person narration and like the rest of "Telling True Stories," is something to which I will be often referring.
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