Me, Myself, & Cyber-I: A Craft Analysis of Narrative Persona in Creative Nonfiction

Abstract

Conceptualising and crafting a memorable and distinct narrative persona is difficult for the burgeoning writer – compounded by the fact that the use of first person is often discouraged in academic writing. Students who have been warned against ‘I-Dropping’ must be taught that using personal ‘I’ is not only accepted, but sometimes expected in academic and creative writing discourse communities. This paper addresses these challenges and outlines an approach to teaching narrative persona in the creative nonfiction classroom. This paper illustrates that narrative persona is a performative persona by applying narratology to both print and digital texts. I argue that blogging has potential as a teaching tool to help students recognise the multiplicity of their narrative persona(s).