Personal Honesty and Privacy

What First-Person Nonfiction Means

• How much of a personal story is true?
• Can I mix facts with memories or imagination?
• How much do I need to reveal about myself?

The Truth Challenge

Finding Your First-Person Voice is designed to get you writing from a personal perspective in playful, open ways. Questions about factual accuracy will inevitably arise, but I don’t want to box you in at the start with too many rules. The skills you’ll gain are transferable to novel writing, poetry, or other genres.

And yet, this course stresses telling the truth about your own experiences.

Here’s where the slope becomes slippery. Many stories about ourselves are handed down, and they shift as time rolls on. You may never know all the facts or be able to verify what happened with a family member or other source.

You may never know all the facts.

In doing these lessons, you’ll probably generate all sorts of material, some of it spun from imagination, some so painful you never want others to hear it. That’s why you’ll keep a Process Notebook to document your journey. It’s a place to write and reflect on your own.

Your private notes can remain private. However, there’s a difference between the process of generating a story and sharing that story in public. And once you begin shaping a personal story for an audience, you’ll face the truth challenge.

The Temptations of Fiction

I enjoy many forms of fiction, especially novels, but as a reader, it matters to me whether the events described really happened or are part of a fictional universe. Fiction allows me to imaginatively enter into other possibilities. That’s also the reason fictionalizing your own story can be so tempting. It’s easy to write off real life as humdrum or constrained by actual events. Why not pump up the action?

Because it’s not true.

You’ll confront how to be truthful in every personal story you tell, and the ethical implications are important. Lying about who you are or what happened, especially to make a nonfiction story more dramatic, is wrong.^[1]

It’s easy to write off real life.

The ethics may seem clear, but the temptations of fiction – in which your “I” narrates a vivid tale – bedevil most of us. In the media, we’re constantly exposed to “true stories” that manipulate or omit crucial facts. Such stories may be entertaining but amount to fiction.

When storytellers bare raw feelings or family secrets, self-disclosure can move an audience. The flip side is that an emotionally appealing first-person narrator can sound sincere regardless of facts.

Personal stories are often based on strong beliefs, which isn’t necessarily dishonest. The real trouble comes when beliefs are passed off as facts or as “everyone knows this.” Such evasiveness is sloppy at least, failing to mention that others believe something else. At worst, it’s propaganda meant to fool or influence people.

Be Transparent and Vulnerable

A truthful approach to first-person nonfiction starts with your own intentions. Are you writing a journalistic article that includes personal anecdotes? This requires research to verify what you know. Are you writing memoir or a personal essay? There, facts may mix with memories and more imaginative material.

Think in terms of transparency. In a first-person story, you can talk directly to your audience. Being transparent about your information sources, biases, and uncertainties is more radically truthful than just checking facts. You acknowledge your subjectivity rather than attempting to sound objective.

Tell readers what you remember or imagine.

You can be strategic as well as honest. Rather than pretending a bad thing didn’t happen, establish firm boundaries about what you’re willing to say. For example: Reader, this person hurt me, but I won’t tell you their real name or where we both grew up. That would be doing to them what they did to me.

Tell readers what you remember or imagine. Journalists focus on tracking down facts, but literary writers argue for the emotional truth of memories and poetic description as well. Memories can be uncertain but nonetheless feel true. In a review of a David Bowie biography, for instance, I frame one memory this way:

“Decades ago, I rode my bike around the suburban cul-de-sacs at dusk, listening to ‘Space Oddity.’ Maybe I had a transistor radio; maybe I just sang the words under my breath. Although I doubt this could be true, I remember being completely alone, the sky above me huge and glowing. I remember black birds disappearing into the clouds.”

I note my doubts in order to reckon honestly with what that music meant to me as a child. Other parts of my 2011 review are packed with factual information.^[2]

Of course, a first-person voice is prone to another temptation: too much information. Few of us like it when somebody gets too personal. More to the writerly point, however, we worry about over-sharing and feel vulnerable if we say too much. Those regrets can be potent emotional blocks. In the New York Times piece “How to Nurse a Vulnerability Hangover,” reporter Holly Burns talks with experts, such as this psychologist, about the upside of expressing vulnerability:

“The aftermath of vulnerability may be unpleasant or surprising, but it’s frequently worth it, Dr. Seppala said. In the emotional intelligence classes she teaches at Yale University, she’s noticed ‘that the more vulnerable and real I am with my examples, the more I can communicate my message.’ Being comfortable with vulnerability’s aftereffects ‘requires courage initially, but then it’s like this muscle you build.'”^[3]

Being vulnerable connects us with others, and it’s integral to personal storytelling. If my “I” talks to readers – as I’m doing now – it offers a glimpse of why I care. I’m not just a disembodied expert telling you how to do something. Such self-disclosure is tricky to navigate, but it’s also relatable and real.

Be Honest With Yourself

When you write on your own, in private, others won’t judge you instantly if you’ve said too much. That’s a big plus in encouraging vulnerability. It’s hard to be transparent until you’ve figured out what you want to say. In your notes and first drafts, get it all down, with as few regrets as possible. You can do the editing later.

What’s in it for you, and what’s in it for the reader?

Yet, once you’re ready to share a personal story, deciding what to include requires honesty with yourself as well as readers. You’re not obligated to expose everything in your life to public scrutiny. A good story isn’t just a lot of talk about feelings, either. It conveys what you observe in the world around you. It makes connections that get across why it matters.

In her 2012 memoir When Women Were Birds, Terry Tempest Williams directly speaks to the tension between saying too much and too little: “We all have our secrets. I hold mine. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.” Williams later adds: “Conversation is the vehicle for change. We hear our own voice in concert with another.”^[4]

Developing the four mental tools of self-awareness, an eye for details, active response, and questioning will guide you here. Why are you telling a story? What’s in it for you, and what’s in it for the reader? Should certain details stay private? Will they help readers understand or are you simply arguing your own side?

Distinguishing between truth and fiction is crucial for authentic self-expression of all kinds. Novels are often autobiographical, but in calling something a novel, writers and publishers let readers know the events depicted shouldn’t be taken literally. The same applies for a hybrid genre like autofiction.

Truth and life keep changing.

The nonfiction I love best overtly grapples with the truth, attributing facts but acknowledging doubt, labeling memories and wishes as the delicate things that they are. My own ideas about what’s true have changed over time, because life changes everyone. The insights you glean will no doubt shift, too, but aiming for truth keeps us all honest.