Dear Geist, Our creative non-fiction teacher assigned us to write a 500-word personal experience piece, with “minimal use of the first person.” And she wouldn’t elaborate. Really? Is this one of those exercises meant to tickle our right brain or something? —Class of Say-Wha?, Cyberspace Dear Class, It does seem goofy to describe one’s own experience without using “I,” “me,” “my” and so on. But that is a great assignment, because it pushes you to take the reader right to what was seen, heard, understood or whatever—that is, the true heart of the piece. Filters such as “I saw,” “I heard,” “I thought” and so on keep the spotlight on the narrator, which is usually unnecessary, often obfuscating and downright annoying in a well-observed, well-written anecdote. Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, in their inspiring book Good Prose, describe the “first-person minor,” or the “restricted first person,” whose presence is referred to very subtly. “As a rule,” they write, “not much about the narrator is revealed, including the narrator’s opinions.” We would quibble a bit with this last one—we think the choice of what to report and what to leave out speaks volumes about the narrator—but that’s just one more reason to keep the deliberate first person out of the spotlight. —The Editors
