5 Personal Narrative Excercises

drawn from the book-in-progress TRAINING FOR THE LONG HAUL

Here are five exercises I use in my personal narrative workshops. Hope you find them useful. —Sebastian

1

Authentic Voice

One of the best ways to engage a reader is to speak about something that you are an expert in, something that you have known over time and through firsthand experience. You engage the reader with confidence and assurance, letting them in on a world that you know intimately.

Try this experiment. Sit down and write a letter to a loved one. In the letter, articulate where you are in your life and what you are presently dealing with. Focus on the most essential and pressing issues. Be honest about your worries and questions about the situation. Make sure to express your hopes for the future. Try to pinpoint where in the past the present-day situation may have its genesis. Be as honest and direct as you can. And, lastly, try to communicate with this loved one just exactly what it is that you hope to do next.

Once you do that, put the letter away for a few hours, or a day, then come back to it and read it aloud. What you come up with may not be the most brilliant of statements, nor does it have to be masterfully written. There’s a good chance it’s stilted and or even unfinished. But I am pretty sure that no matter what you got down on the page it will be authentic to your experience. And in your own voice. And that, if nothing else, you have taken the first steps toward uncovering the motive behind writing your story. The need to tell it. Its occasion for speech.

II

Present Perfect Ground

Go back a month or two and find a moment that feels like it begins a new stage of life that you’re still in. Write it down at the top of an empty page. (For example: “Ever since Hurricane Helene hit, I have been walking around with my head in my hands unsure of what to do next…”)

Once you have created this present perfect time period, start finding places inside it from which to jump back into the past. (“After the first week, when we were still without water and electricity, upon waking I had a memory of that summer we spent with our parents on the beach in a little cabin without water or electricity….”) Tell this memory in summary, giving a few details to paint the picture, then return to the present. (“It wasn’t until the next week that my back began to go out…”)

Now jump back in the past again. (“My back went out for the first time when I hauled furniture for a summer job. I thought I was Hercules….”) Tell that story in brief then jump back to the present. Try to connect the story to something that’s happening in the present.

Do this jumping back-in-time-then-returning-to-the-present dance one more time; but this time bring us up to present day and write about what you imagine life will be like three months from now. (“I lost my husband a few years back; it’s hard to imagine a post-hurricane life without him. Instead of planning for the future, I keep going back to when we were first married…”)

III

Know Your Paradigm

Write about a place that you know very well. Maybe you’re a gym rat. Or you have returned to the same summer cabin for twenty years. Or you like to bowl and have been a league for a long time. Or you have worked as a nurse in an operating room for your whole career, or you spent five years behind bars. Or maybe you spend a large amount of time in your bedroom recovering from an illness.

Write about the place as an insider, as someone who knows that subculture, that world, like the back of your hand. You can play this sense of expertness up of if you’d like, brag a little even, but make sure to take us into the inner workings of a place, a scene, a subculture. Have fun, make it playful…

Now write about a place you don’t know well but would like to. Someplace you are new to (just starting ballroom dancing classes, for instance) and are still trying to figure how things work. Tell us about the scene and let us see what confuses you or confounds you. Try to make sense of the dynamics. Give us a feeling of your learning curve.

IV

Writing Off Family Photos

Select a photo that you have had in your possession for a long time—a photo of a loved one—one that means a lot to you and that you cherish.

Ruminate on the photo. Try to imagine what your loved one is thinking: why and how they have arrived at that moment and where they were headed next. Also: try to remember what the photo has meant to you at different times in your life. Did you take the picture? If not, who did? What does it mean to you to possess it?

Ask yourself if its significance has changed over time. Is there anyone you’d like to gift this photo to in the future? Should it be kept a personal secret?

In general, use the photo as an opportunity to remember this person and explore their essence. Interrogate your own feelings about him or her as well as your relationship.

V

“Every Summer, One Summer”

This exercise has been used in various forms by generations of writing teachers. I am not claiming ownership on this one. But here’s how I like to present it to my students…

Write a paragraph or two about your childhood that begins with the phrase “Every summer….” (You can choose something a little different, such as “Every Sunday…” or “Every time there was a summer downpour….”) The key here is to choose a subject that you and your family (or you and you brother, or sister, or best friend or lover) experienced serially, something you have returned to over and over. Try to capture what it was like in general to have this experience repeated over a span of years.

Now write a paragraph or two that begins “One summer…” or “One Sunday….” Try to be specific about this one particular experience, capturing what made it unique from the others. Give us details about the experience and try to slow down and capture the feel of what happened, moving us toward the central incident.

Next, write inside the incident. The goal here is to slow down enough to write in real time: to give the reader the feeling of experiencing the event along with the characters. You began this exercise at a macro level; now you’ve arrived at the micro. Let us see what is happening, and hear it, and smell it, and taste it. Put us right there. Don’t stop writing until you have captured the scene in full.