About Six Views

Who are you? It may seem obvious, until you try to describe your “I.” In this lesson, you’ll play with various views of who you are, becoming more aware of how your first-person voice can shift and flex.

For example, note how I introduced myself in this book.

Many Ways to Look at Yourself

We’re often called on to fill in factual information about ourselves, whether applying for a job, in a doctor’s office, or writing a biographical note. Facts are facts, but they rarely ring with the individual sound of your voice.

In To Show and to Tell, Phillip Lopate’s essay collection about nonfiction craft, he points out that novice writers using “I” tend to “think they’ve said or conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable.” Lopate continues:

“In their minds, that I may be swimming with background and a lush, sticky past and an almost too fatal specificity, whereas the reader encountering it for the first time in a new piece sees only a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on.”^[1]

Your “I” is not one thing.

Your “I” is not one thing. I don’t mean we’re all walking around with multiple personalities, but we play various roles in our lives, such as child, parent, employee, teacher, or friend. When writing, consider which view of yourself matters in telling a particular story.

That’s the start of finding your first-person voice, and it will take you beyond name, rank, and identity label.

Q. How does this lesson build on the previous lesson?

The previous lesson introduces the value of self-reflection in finding your first-person voice. In “Six Views of Yourself,” you’ll experiment with presenting different aspects of your “I” in a description. Our thoughts and feelings resemble a flow of experience and observations more than one true self. Honest personal stories acknowledge these changing views.

Q. Shouldn’t my first-person voice be consistent?

Yes and no. A strong first-person voice has a consistent tone and style. Yet what the writer chooses to observe affects the details included from story to story.

Your voice is not a Platonic ideal.

Much of what determines a first-person voice is the quality of those observed details. Your voice is not a Platonic ideal, but a record of lived experience. Expressing self-awareness about how much life changes over time also strengthens your voice.

Q. How much do I need to say about myself?

That’s a good question and one you should keep asking yourself. The answer will change, depending on the kind of story you’re telling.

Find the balance between saying too little and TMI.

Balancing the tendency to say too little about yourself with the purge of dumping too much information (TMI) is a challenge in personal storytelling. But the more you write in the first-person voice, the better you’ll get at achieving that balance — and these lessons are designed to give you lots of practice.

For more suggestions about how to approach truthfulness in first-person stories, see “Personal Honesty and Privacy” in the Introductory section.