Are you unintentionally distancing your reader?

Are you telling your memoir from your point of view? You’re thinking, Of course I am! I’m telling it in the first-person! But you may be creating a distance from your reader without even realizing it. 

Let me explain through the example below.  

“Our car raced down the street at breakneck speeds, whizzing past all of the other vehicles and almost running over a pedestrian. This pace continued as we maneuvered down the highway until we finally ran out of gas twenty miles later.” 

If you’re not seeing the problem with this, keep reading.

The text I just gave you has a certain distancing effect, what I call the drone effect. If there were a camera recording this version of events, the camera would be positioned far above the action, recording all of it in a wide shot.

However, in a memoir, we need the narrator's point of view, which means “the camera” needs to be inside the car. Instead of getting a global understanding of what is happening, we need to see only what the narrator is witnessing.  

See if you notice the difference between this rewritten version and the previous one:

“How could I get Johan to slow down the car? He was angry. I got that, but did that mean putting both of our lives in danger? There were just inches separating us from the car in front of us. If that car slowed down by just ten miles, we’d plow into its backend. Johan swerved just in time. I wonder how long he planned to continue at this pace.”

In the example with Johan, we are not getting a generic, distanced point of view. Rather, we're sitting in the passenger seat with the narrator getting her point of view on everything that happens. 

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Let me give you one more example. Here is the generic, drone point of view: 

“The man slammed his fist into my face. He pounded into me over and over again until he was too tired to keep inflicting pain.”

How would I rewrite this so that the camera is “on the narrator’s head” so to speak? 

“I felt a searing pain in my stomach. Suddenly, I realized I'd been hit. I barely had time to register the next fist coming toward me. I instinctively covered my head with my arms, but he was stronger than I was.” 

In the second version, instead of witnessing this moment from a distance, we are seeing it through the narrator’s eyes, which works to make this so much more compelling.

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A reader picks up a memoir because they want to live through your experiences fully. They don’t want a generic account of what happened. So don’t distance your reader by being an anonymous narrator. This is your story. Give us your point of view.


Hope this helps you. As always, happy writing!