Day 1

The Reluctant I. Write a first-person story in which you use the first person pronoun (I or me or my) only two times – but keep the “I” somehow important to the narrative you’re constructing. The point of this exercise is to imagine a narrator who is less interested in himself than in what he is observing. You can make your narrator someone who sees an interesting event in which he is not necessarily a participant. Or you can make him self-effacing, yet a major participant in the events related. It is very important in this exercise to make sure your reader is not surprised, forty or fifty words into the piece, to realize that this is a first person narration. Show us quickly who is observing the scene. 600 words.

The people we tend to like most are those who are much more interested in other people than themselves, selfless and caring, whose conversation is not a stream of self-involved remarks (like the guy who, after speaking about himself to a woman at a party for half an hour, says, “Enough about me, what do you think of me?”). I’m not trying to legislate only likeable characters or narrators. I use the example of successful social selves above to give an idea of what is needed in successful fiction. Another lesson you might learn from this exercise is how important it is to let things and events speak for themselves beyond the ego of the narration.