Reading to Spark Yourself

There’s no required reading here, but the supplemental text is my book First-Person Journalism: A Guide to Writing Personal Nonfiction with Real Impact.^[1]

Even in these digital days, writers are often passionate readers — and when you’re sparked by reading, it broadens your perspective on yourself and the kind of storytelling you like. There are many ways to write in the first-person voice.

Each lesson includes an optional assignment from my book along with related work by another writer. Your first assignment from my book appears below.

Optional activity before the lessons:

Read: Preface (“Personal Journalism for Challenging Times”) and Chapter 1 (“How I Became a First-Person Journalist”) from First-Person Journalism.

Respond: In your Process Notebook, reflect on these chapters and why you’re interested in first-person writing. If you have questions, list them, too.

The optional activities with each lesson provide notebook prompts for the readings, which can also be discussed with a writing group.

A big part of finding your first-person voice is to think through why you like or question another author’s work. The point is not to be overly critical. It’s a means for cultivating an active response to what you read and to other media. Such passionate engagement with media and the world is a key mental tool. Rather than a kneejerk “like” response, it requires you to think and feel more deeply.