Closing Inspiration

I’m primarily a nonfiction writer, but I also like novels, poetry, drama, and many other genres with strong first-person voices. I view it all as fuel that sustains my writing.

As you continue on your writing journey, be inspired by whatever stories move you to raise your own voice.

Listen from the Heart

If you’ve finished the lessons, you’ve come on a journey of the heart. Of the mind, too, but personal storytelling depends on connecting deep feeling with thinking.

I hope you value your Process Notebook, which contains all the work you’ve put into these lessons. It’s up to you whether you continue writing, but keeping a notebook can help make meaning far beyond wanting to improve your skills.

Consider the first-person protagonist in Sarah Winman’s beautiful novel Tin Man, when he thinks he’s lost the notebook “a doctor suggested I write to make sense of the world around me” during the AIDS crisis. Fortunately, he finds his notebook, but here’s how he expresses what it means to him:

“I suddenly needed to write. I reached down into my rucksack but my notebook wasn’t there. I panicked when I couldn’t find it. It has become my best friend. My imaginarium. My staff. And I cried. Writing has become my discipline, my comfort. Oh, clever doctor.” ^[1]

Listen to Other First-Person Voices

Now that you’ve come on this journey, begin noting down first-person voices that capture your heart. Keep a list in your notebook. I’m drawn to essayists and other nonfiction writers, but fictional first-person narrators and journal writers (such as Winman’s character) may also spark you as a writer and reader.

In Dana Spiotta’s novel Stone Arabia, her fictional first-person narrator expresses what many writers feel when responding passionately to art – and when they want to make connections beyond their own perspectives:

“We all long to escape our subjectivity. That’s what art can do, give us a glimpse of ourselves connected with every human, now and forever, our disconnected, lonely terms escaped for a moment. It offers the consolation of recognition, no small thing.” ^[2]

In addition, podcasts or other recordings of first-person writers reading their work can be inspirational. As with reading words aloud, listening to others read their stories helps tap into the emotional impact of first-person writing.

Suggested Response: Select a moving passage from another writer in the first-person voice and read it out loud. In your Process Notebook, reflect on the emotional impact of such personal storytelling.

If you’re not sure about which writer to read, try the passage below. It’s another one from Winman’s novel.