Using yourself as a case study in your nonfiction book can be a great way to bring your messages to life, especially if your book is about personal development or business advice. When you’re sharing a true story of your own, you don’t need to gain anyone else’s permission to use the material. You can be as nuanced, revealing, colourful, specific, shameless, frank, self-deprecating, shocking or insightful as you like. And because you’re describing a first-hand experience, you’ll find it easy to bring the story to life with kind of details that you might never be able to capture in an interview, and would probably find hard to invent in a hypothetical case study.
But that very advantage brings with it a pitfall to watch out for. When you’re too close to the subject matter, it can be very difficult to decide which details to include and what to leave out.
You’ll know when you start getting in too deep. Just as you’re recounting verbatim the cross-boardroom theatrics in that critical meeting, or explaining why your father happened to be home from work on the day you set fire to the garage, you’ll find yourself wondering: “Wait, does anybody care about this? Am I getting too personal, or going on about this for too long? Does this even make sense to anyone who wasn’t there?”
It’s often difficult to gauge the interest value of our own stories. Every one of us is the star of our own gripping personal saga, but when we put a scene from our life on stage, it’s very hard to be an objective dramaturge. A good rule of thumb: Make sure that every element in your anecdote is in service to your larger point. The whole reason for using case studies in nonfiction writing is to humanize and illustrate an abstract concept through storytelling. If a particular detail doesn’t help the reader to understand the lesson, leave it out.
That might seem obvious, but it’s hard to do in practice. We often get caught up in the feeling that we are obliged to give a full, play by play account of exactly how the situation unfolded in order to be true to the facts, or that we need to explain things about the setting or backstory in order to put the anecdote in context. Sometimes that is the case, but more often it’s not.
If you hear these internal debates in your head, you might be about to share a little too much information.
1. “I know it’s a little off topic, but it’s interesting / funny / incredible.”
When it comes to case studies, tangents are your enemy. The world is full of interesting things that don’t belong in your book. What might make for an amusing side note around the dinner table will only feel like a confusing detour in writing. Stick to the point.
2. “It’s kind of a long story, but that’s how it happened.”
Every moment in your life has led up to the one you are living now. But which ones are necessary in order to tell this story? It depends on your reason for telling it. Say you’re telling a story about the day you signed your divorce papers, and you’re wondering whether to include the fact that they accidentally got delivered to your neighbour’s house. If you’re telling this story to illustrate a point about legal confidentiality or community relationships, then by all means include it. But if your point is about how to handle difficult family events in front of children, then cut your neighbour’s part from the story. It will slow things down and weaken the story’s impact.
3. “That incident had repercussions that went on for years.”
I’m sure that’s true. Most things do. But which ones prove the point you set out to make in the first place? Travelling down every little byway of all the emotional and practical impacts on your life will frustrate and bore your reader.
Writing about your own direct experiences does not have to come across as self-indulgent navel gazing. Of course you should employ some quirky observations and descriptive detail to tell the story entertainingly, but be ruthlessly economical with the narrative. Just treat yourself as you would a third party subject. Which parts of this person’s experience are relevant to the reader? Put those in the book, and save the rest for your blog.
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