The objective narrator, in my mind, is the best narrator for fiction, especially when the author wishes to keep their judgments out of the text. The best fiction is that which creates a living, breathing world in which the characters live their lives, creating action and conflict, climax and resolution, through their own needs and desires, illuminating and, in their own way, documenting the eternal struggle between the interests of the individual and the seemingly “greater” interests of the community, group, state, or nation.

One of the keys to writing narrative (anything from the personal essay and short story to the memoir or novel) has nothing to do with form, style, voice, subject, or grammar. It has to do with structure and discipline, commitment to the work, to the vocation of being a writer.

Why tell a story? Why tell your story? What, in fact, is storytelling? I put these questions out there not so much to answer them myself but to have you think about them, particularly because these questions go to the heart of writing literature of all kinds, to why we do it, why we write and tell stories, drawn from the crucible of the imagination as well as the very real world in which we exist and live our humanity. But even more so, these questions are pivotal to the endeavor of memoir writing and personal narrative.

The narrative voice is at once about containment and flow, movement forward without faltering and missing a step in the dance to the music of Time. The form, without being inflexible, must give rise to the forward movement of the narrative, leading to and closing off the flow when the storyline calls for, when the plot has come to its end, the denouement reached, or when the history of the idea or event, or of one’s own life in memoir or autobiography, has been brought to its inevitable curtain fall.