I listened. I still had a husband and two other children.

The narrator isn't out on the street watching when her child is killed. No horrifying moment as she realizes that the truck is going to jump the sidewalk and hit her son. No descriptions of a crumpled body on the street. For a first-person narrator to describe such things at all might seem ghoulish. To adequately express the emotions might be impossible. To describe it all coldly would be too clinical. Yet to skip over the events, as in the example, is rather coy.

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Choose one. Maybe coyness is in character; maybe the character is clinical. Maybe you're a good enough writer to tell the immediate feelings of a mother who watched her child die-without getting maudlin or grotesque. These choices are all available.

But there are several other choices to keep in mind. You can decide to use a different narrator. Why not the neighbor woman, Rainie? Make her the protagonist's close confidante, so she can be closely involved in this woman's struggle. She can actually see the accident with the less passionate horror of a bystander, avoiding the much stronger emotions of a parent. She has enough distance to be a clear, direct narrator; enough closeness to witness everything.

Or you can use a third-person narrator-with all the drawbacks and benefits that entails. We'll discuss those later.

Arthur Conan Doyle chose well in deciding not to have Sherlock Holmes narrate his own stories. Using Watson as narrator allowed Doyle to withhold information from the audience without being unfair. Holmes knew certain information, but Watson didn't, so Watson could tell us all that he knew in the order he found it out, without spoiling the surprise. Since Watson never knows as much as Holmes, neither do we.

There is another benefit, though. Imagine if we had to listen to Holmes's intellectual, arrogant tone through every word of the story. Instead of admiring his godlike mind from below, we would find him insufferably conceited. He might even be ridiculous. This is the choice Agatha Christie made with Hercule Poirot-but Poirot was never worshipped as audiences have worshipped Sherlock Holmes.

The narrator's voice is your greatest asset-and your greatest drawback. Your first-person narrator can't be a bore, or your story will be boring. She can't describe herself performing noble acts, or she will seem vain for having told the tale at all.

Yet you can tell us much about your narrator by showing him do a brave, heroic act without him giving us a sign that he realizes the act was heroic at all. Or he can do something terrible, all the while explaining exactly why his crime was not a crime at all, but a necessary act-while we listen in horror.

She wouldn't be quiet, even when I tried to tell her how important it was for her not to say those things. There's some things a man just doesn't have to put up with from a woman. You listen to them blab on all the time about their girl friends and going shopping and what the kids did, and you figure that's just what women's heads are full of. But when she starts getting down on a man for doing what men do, well, that's over the line, that's more than a man has to put up with. What she's really doing, she's just trying to get you to prove to her that you really are a man, maybe sometimes just because you've been too tired sometimes, or too nice about it in bed, so you hear her talking like that, you don't put your hands in your pockets. You knock her around, you let her know that you still got the power in your arm, you still got the strength to be the man she needs you to be. It hurts her, of course, but it hurts her sweet, that's what my dad always said, she gets a bloody lip but it tastes sweet to her because she knows she's got a real man. Only this time shejust wouldn't quiet down, she just kept yelling at me and saying crap that I don't have to put up with, and then she