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.

In the need to find the pieces of you, to find your voice and your self or identity, keeping a journal is of the utmost importance. The only person who can do the work of this search and identification is you. This is your life and your identity to be discovered through the hard work of active self-development and awareness. No, none of us exists in a vacuum, and so our lives will be complex, full of a varied engagement with others, with nature and culture, and with the media whose agenda is to shape this culture to its own ends and purposes, and so our journals will reflect all these interactions in both implicit and explicit ways.

Literature need not (and really, should not) be morally didactic or heavy-handed in how it tells its story, but it must hold a mirror up to nature and show us to ourselves. Literature must explore the world and the human condition; its reflection of human nature should be so clear and honest that it leaves no question as to its true purpose, which is to instill in us an experience of what it means to be human.

Why do we write literature? Why do we read it? I think the simple, understated answer is to feel connected. I think what gives literature (the fictions we write, the stories we tell) its sense of permanence in a world that knows no other force but constant change is the inherent need we have to feel and be connected with one another

The literature we read is, on the surface, about a variety of different things, but beneath the handful of similar plots and narratives that are altered only by different characters and places there are three things which every writer (I’m speaking primarily of fiction and poetry here) writes about, and which are fundamental to what it means to be human: God, sex, and death.

Every individual has their own interests. Many of us not only become practiced in these interests but knowledgeable in them as well. If you wish to share your interests by writing about them, you must have in-depth knowledge about your subject.

I’m not going to discuss what makes a work of literature a classic. That’s a complicated, consuming question. What I want to address is when one should read the classics. Simply put, a literary classic is a text that is layered; one that can be read multiple times and still yield truths and ideas concerning the wider world in which we live.

Writing is a difficult, at times terrifying but also liberating, activity. It takes years of writing in one genre before it ultimately becomes second nature to you. The most important tool any writer can develop is their voice. And throughout the years as you mature as an individual, your voice will change and evolve along with you.

Books speak. They contain the voices of individuals from the past telling us who we are as human beings, individually and as a race, by showing us in great meditative detail who they were as individuals and who we were as a race in times long gone

Literature shows us the humanness of our experiences, and the universality of those experiences. The details may be different (gender, time period, locale, even language) but human character, literature has repeatedly and relentlessly shown us for millennia, has not fundamentally changed.

There is great truth in the saying “the pen is mightier than the sword”; transformative ideas are not born of the sword and violence, but of thoughtful reflection and analysis set down in language.

In early 2013 I decided to start writing in a journal again. From August 2000 through 2007 I had kept a journal of ideas and responses to different books I had been reading. Around late 2003 my journal writing trailed off, and I cannot honestly say why, as I don’t remember. Fast-forward to late winter 2013 and I decided it was time to start journaling again. Again, this is a journal of ideas, and I have been trying to keep up with it in the midst of looking for work, doing said work, trying to have a life, continuing to read, and barely finding any time to write, or the inspiration to as well. But this time I’m more committed to journaling as a means of expressing my ideas and my own self in language that will be viewed by my eyes only.

As a writer for more than a quarter century now, it was not until reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s ‘We,’ that I gave the idea of the author’s duty, or the writer’s responsibility, more than a passing thought. More often than not, a literary text in any genre is first off perceived as a work of self-expression. Only secondarily is it spoken of as having and presenting a message, revealed through the story, for all texts, even those of history and criticism, tell a story, for humans live and operate through narrative, that which structures and sets an order to (read, imposes) our personal lives and the life of our communities, society, and nation.

Nineteenth-century authors wrote lengthy narratives with numerous characters, weaving their lives together or creating parallel lives in the same landscape. Nineteenth-century fiction, more often than not, reads like an endless morality tale, because “literature” served to develop the moral character of the reader while being couched in an entertaining and adventurous narrative. The majority of fiction today, however, being genre based, is nowhere as lengthy and does not intricately develop characters’ lives; they lack a multitude of layers.

I’ve never really known what it means to write my creative work longhand. As a poet, I write onscreen because most of my recent work is short, but I’ve always written directly onscreen because the same year I got my first computer was the same year I started writing. As an essayist the routine has been the same. Computers and word-processing programs have made writers’ lives easier, neater, if you will, in this way, but there is always the danger of your computer crashing, getting a virus, and destroying your work, but then again handy little thumb drives have staved off that issue, if you remember to save your latest version on one each time you write.

The best reading experience is a critical as well as creative one. In critically interpreting the text a reader creatively reads it. By the very nature of language, any and every text is ambiguous, allowing for “correct” readings, misreadings, and layered readings. These readings, however, become slanted and biased when the narrator is not objective and allows their voice, their thoughts, feelings, or opinions to enter into the story, thereby controlling how the narrative is read and how the subject (think scholarly nonfiction) is perceived, and ultimately stands in judgment of the historical figures or the fictional characters. This leads to the reader being unable to read with an unaffected mind, free of outside influence, hence disabling a reading that is nonjudgmental and unbiased.