Narrative/Memior

Your personal life is exactly what it sounds like: personal. Make it personal. Add emotions YOU felt, things YOU saw, that YOU want to add in. It's your life, not any one else. They can't judge what isn't theirs. Make it personal, and more so, make it yours.

From example three from http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Basic_Writing/Narrative_and_memoir#Narrative_and_Memoir, "I couldn't say anything. What could I say?" I really, really like this. It seems like they threw their emotion out there for us to feel ourselves; their hopelessness and loss of words. It's something we all have felt at one point or another. We can all connect. But they still made it seem like they owned that emotion, that it's theirs. From the same post, "At this point I was hysterical and customers were steering their shopping carts way around me. When my mom finally answered her comforting voice was gone." They made it seem like they flipped the emotion to their mother. Their mom's loss of words were there now, and they had taken a more hysterical role. I loved how this was a flipped role. Again, it seemed like he emotions they felt were only theirs.

For my narrative, I might write of my first time dealing with death- of my first dog, Lightning, and the trips I used to take out in the forest to visit his grave marked by two large tree trunks we laid across it. Or, I might write just about the trips I used to make through the forest behind my house, of the things I saw and felt (physically and emotionally) while there; building to the emotions felt on the day I left to move to town. Something along those lines, where there's a build to the story, not just... a story.