M.J. Andersen: Some strategies for first-person writing
|
|
12.23.98
M.J. Andersen: Some strategies for first-person writing |
|
Related: Beating stress the 8-fold way My column on Buddhism and stress arose from weakness. That is, for not the first time, I gave way to the impulse to write about what I was reading. I guess it's the term-paper reflex. I might have been able to construct this column more gracefully by leaving myself completely out of it, and just confining my remarks to the relationship between Buddhism and stress. The problem, though, was that I didn't know enough about Buddhism to write authoritatively. So that was the rationale for the first-person strategy, which I tried to distance myself from as quickly as possible once the premise of the column was set forth. Also, I wanted to play with these ideas rather than do a serious analysis, so the first-person entrance helped me set the tone. I ran into a colleague, Bill Donovan, who is a financial reporter, shortly after he wrote his extremely nice comments on behalf of the Journal's Writing Contest Committee. We agreed that we were both pretty sick of first-person writing. The same week, I had visited a journalism class with Journal Columnist Bob Kerr, and he mentioned that he was pretty sick of first-person writing. So maybe a positive trend has begun. I have a tendency to do it too much, especially in a pinch, and I'm trying to move away from it. One thing I would say, though, is that first-person writing is easier to take when the writer is using a distancing strategy of some kind. For instance, we actually know very little about the personal life of Dave Barry. His distancing device is humor, and despite a certain amount of predictability, he has used it well over the years. |
 Previous editions | About The Providence Journal's Writing Program | E-mail us | Order How I Wrote the Story | Writing-related Web links Back to main
Copyright © 1998 The Providence Journal Company
|
