Full name: The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

Author: Vivian Gornick Year: 2001 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Writing, Non Fiction, Memoirs, Essays Purchase/reserch links: Amazon Goodreads LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780374528584 0374528586

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 intelligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of nonfiction. 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. Similar books: The Faith of a Writer by Joyce Carol Oates The Writing Life by Annie Dillard Madeleine L'Engle Herself by Madeleine L'Engle Draft No. 4 by John McPhee Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach Henry Miller on Writing by Henry Miller The Writing Life by Marie Arana Old Friend from Far Away by Natalie Goldberg Still Writing by Dani Shapiro Approaching Eye Level by Vivian Gornick Story Engineering by Larry Brooks The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass Writer's Little Helper by James V. Smith, Jr. Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain Telling Lies for Fun & Profit by Lawrence Block The Plot Thickens by Noah Lukeman Notes from No Man's Land by Eula Biss Negotiating with the Dead by Margaret Atwood Meditations from a Movable Chair by Andre Dubus The Wrong Way to Save Your Life by Megan Stielstra