The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative Paperback – 11 Oct. 2002

This is a classic book and if you have some writing ability, I dont, you will find it both fascinating and inspiring.Fo me however it was a great read, I really found it a fascinating book BUT it was not much help for me at my low level of ability to help me write my stories. Its like this is a text for university students and I am still in primary school. It was in a way demotivating in the way that an amateur runner might feel put off after a training session with Olympic athleets.

Good tips

An exploration of what is involved in writing a good memoir or essay. Gornick has two keen insights into what makes personal narrative work, in brief – first, create an honest, detached ‘narrator’ (oneself, but more honest and detached than the person who is living your life), and second, understand the difference between ‘situation’ and ‘story’. “The situation,” she says, “is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.” By way of illustration, she quotes extensively from several fascinating writers and critiques what they achieve. On the downside, I found her style often impenetrably vague and diffuse, and some of her opinions too didactic and unsubstantiated. Her own ‘narrator’ wasn’t coming across as wholly honest and detached: I had the impression she was cross about something but wasn’t addressing it. A flavour of a person in a glass house throwing stones? Thought-provoking, and well worth a read by any writer.

I found the book pretentious and insincere. I just stopped reading it.