> By becoming overly sentimental, bordering on mawkish, it loses the impact that a frank, thoughtful reflection on the actual event could have had. Or it refle

> By becoming overly sentimental, bordering on mawkish, it loses the impact that a frank, thoughtful reflection on the actual event could have had. Or it reflects how the event happened to him, as opposed to how the event just happened. When writing narrative essays, remember that truth is subjective, and you have a choice between being loyal to how it impacted the narrator and how it 'objectively happened'. If you want the latter, you'll just end up with an overdetermined logfile. I don't know what parts of David Sedaris's stories are true, and I don't care - all I know is that some of them are incredibly powerful emotionally, and that man sure knows how to nail the ending of a story.