Although conversational stories within one individual's corpus share the same structure, they have features that set them apart from one another. Based on the stories' general characteristics and the way they function in ongoing talk, they can be identified as: (1) durable personal experience narratives (PENs), which are often repeated during the narrator's lifetime; (2) disposable PENs, told only once or twice with the structure of a narrative, then forgotten; and (3) news stories, about events current in the narrator's life. PENs are told in the first person; news stories may be told in the first or third person. Durable PENs develop a stable pattern and are recalled as a complete unit. Disposable stories never develop a pattern, are characterized by many hesitations, and many include unnecessary details. All story types overlap to some degree. Durable PENs are generally preceded by an abstract or preface, but disposable stories have no preface and therefore no easy transition from conversation to narrative. News stories may have abstracts that change speech events from conversation to narrative, but the abstract fits into the conversation differently and may be very abrupt. A structural analysis of a durable PEN, transcription guide, and brief bibliography are appended. (MSE)