The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative | Vivian Gornick

The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative | Vivian Gornick | Made me want to get back to writing

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The Situation and ...

	The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative Vivian Gornick Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002 - 184 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of LoveAll narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.

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write it right- the Gornick way

The Situation and the Story although easy to follow is a tough read. Gornick's book tells how to read memoirs as well as how to write them. She strives for the highest standards and lays great responsiblity on the wrier's shoulders. Beyond just relating a good story that happens to be true, Gornick expects the writer to impart wisdomto the reader gained by the writerfrom the act of writing the memoir. If the writer didn't gain wisdom, t she probably shouldn't write the memoir.
For serious memoirist the book is a must read, and reread, and reread.

Made me want to get back to writing

Gornick manages to analyze exactly what makes a personal essay successful without sounding didactic or sentimental. I'm not surprised, as she is a terrific writer herself. She uses examples of pieces and excerpts from well-known and not-so-well known writers. For anyone who has written creative non-fiction and hasn't always known what to do to improve their work, Gornick offers an unusual way of looking at things, an interesting combination of intuitive and analytical. If you are new to writing, she offers suggestions on how to read other writers, and what to look for. I would add this to "Bird by Bird," by Anne Lamott, as excellent and inspiring books for writers.

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Excavating a Life

Writers can be like cats, waiting for the right piece of string to be dangled in front of them, the one that tugs. The Situation and Story was that string for me, with the right words and examples at the right time to pull me forward. It's how Gornick describes the necessity to get inside one's own mind, excavate its interiority that makes the book magic. For example, she says, memoir is "a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows," a way to get acquainted with the stranger who lives inside your own skin." Her use of favorite writers' (Joan Didion and Loren Eisley) stories really helped illustrate for me the situation and the story. Most useful, as a writer of memoir, were these words: "Memoir isn't what happened but what the writer makes of what happened." That's the key to memoir I didn't understand before.

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Now THIS is a classroom in the BEST sense of the word

I thought I'd read 'The Best' works out there on writing, especially a Memoir, but this surpasses all so far since she gives a very CLEAR analysis of using 'your voice' so that you "intrigue, not bore" the reader... making the reader believe and trust in your story and guiding them to a conclusion. I like being offered examples to match my work up against, not unlike when you in a writing workshop.

Book was not what I thought it would be