If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is.
Good afternoon, class. Today, after I return graded work, we'll review the descriptive essay (#1), the final draft of which we'll work on today, sentence structure, and the particulars of essay 2, rough due next week. You will have time to work on the final draft of it next week in class, too.
In personal essays authors explore their experience, usually in first-person voice, using description and narration to reveal the memories and images that have stayed with them and the meaningful or intriguing aspects of their life journey. They may address topical matters or issues, or contemplate the big questions of life, as they reflect and meditate upon life. The structure and style vary and may be experimental, an outgrowth of the struggle to express experience and to shape it, with a focus on mood, characterization, and dramatic action or tension. The personal essay often resembles first-person fiction.
Narrative mode pulls together the basic elements of story: character, with whatever history and personality and motivation allow for insight into the action; plot, the arranged action/events/scenes that trigger and show he development of a certain conflict ; setting, which brings a clear sense of time and place and the force the two exert; narrative point of view, the perspective of the storyteller or narrator; and theme, the idea(s) put into play by all the elements together, whether of innocence, experience, youth, age, promise, loss, death . . . The narrative should be essentially true, for a narrative essay is a non-fiction genre.
The element of suspense, a question(s) hanging over all, tends to make readers stay tuned, so try to build that element in; make the reader want to know what happens next, and why, but don't give it all away too quickly.
The reporter's basic questions are a shorthand means of remembering to get the essentials:
What happened?
Who was involved?
When?
Where?
Why did this happen?
How did it happen?
Short narratives may be structured chronologically, they may begin in the middle of things, or they work from the end back toward the beginnings of the events in focus; they may even of course move back and forth, as if showing how memory itself refuses to play in strict chronology. However you decide to structure your piece, it is a good idea to build into the fabric strong images in fairly simple, specific, concrete terms rather than with overly complicated, too general or abstract terms. You want to pull the reader through the window of the letters and words on the page into the sensuous, three-dimensional world of life as we see, hear, smell, touch, feel, and think about it.
Figurative language–metaphor, simile, personification–can be charming.
Figurative language–metaphor, simile, personification–can be charming.
Example:
Once on a Wednesday excursion when I was a little girl, my father bought me a beaded wire ball that I loved. At a touch, I could collapse the toy into a flat coil between my palms, or pop it open to make a hollow sphere. Rounded out, it resembled a tiny Earth, because its hinged wires traced the same pattern of intersecting circles that I had seen on the globe in my schoolroom–the thin black lines of latitude and longitude. The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.
--Longitude, David Sobel
Here is another example, of the sight of a mustache (a bit overdone perhaps!):
A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. . . . [It] was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs in the mornings over a tiny flame. . . . The only other way he could have achieved this effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the mirror every morning.
A truly terrifying sight, a thick orange hedge that sprouted and flourished between his nose and his upper lip and ran clear across his face from the middle of one cheek to the middle of the other. . . . [It] was curled most splendidly upwards all the way along as though it had had a permanent wave put into it or possibly curling tongs in the mornings over a tiny flame. . . . The only other way he could have achieved this effect, we boys decided, was by prolonged upward brushing with a hard toothbrush in front of the mirror every morning.
Special Effects: Heighten the effect of seeing by making what is familiar appear unfamiliar or strange and interesting by shifting perspective–the extreme close up, the distance shot, the fragment or part that puts the whole, be it a place, person, or thing, in a strong light. Use distinctive language in so far as possible, without making the whole fussy or tediously detailed.
Names: Be mindful of the power of names to particularize and connote ideas and images and provide aural zing: Huckleberry Finn, Scarlett O'Hara, Venus Williams, Miss Bee ; Kissimmee, Florida; Bountiful, Utah, Itta Bena, Mississippi. The names of people, places, and things can be intriguing and interesting sources of sound and word play.
Dialogue: dialogue may help to advance the action, set a tone, illustrate character and key ideas or points, and advance the action. It is a dramatic device and pulls readers into a virtual present.
Refining the Draft Idea: Writing teachers and textbooks often refer to the angle or hook or slant as a way of luring readers to the subject article or book. Readers have different needs and tastes, of course, but there's nothing wrong with familiarizing yourself with the common types of bait that show up in titles or headlines and lead paragraphs of various kinds of essays. Here are a few:
*Adrenaline *Numbers
*Amazement *Promises
*Brand-New *Secrets
*Detailed *Sexy
*Funny *Superlative
*Location *Combination
*Money
*Newsy
The meaning we make of existence becomes clearer in our stories or narratives. Story (true or nonfiction) involves events, actions, a conflict set in motion, consequences, the underlying motives and feelings of those involved, the lessons and insights gained through the experiences recounted. In writing narrative for a reading audience, you must also convey a sense of purpose, and a point. It's not enough to have had experiences; you must show readers the sense to be made of them.
Autobiographical narratives are structured as stories about the writer himself or herself, what some have called "core stories," and they are related to our core beliefs. Such stories show an individual caught in some way, facing something troublesome that has to be dealt with or overcome in some measure. They show the author both recounting and reflecting on personal experience, making sense of it, putting it in some meaningful frame to be understood and thus communicated to a reader. Such essays may have an historical, social, psychological, philosophical, and /or religious frame, delving into the events, the changes, the lessons, and particularly the themes that have shaped the author's life. Who one has been, and is, is the central focus; the story elements–character, setting, action–serve to dramatize the life. Description is used to convey the physical characteristics of person, places, and things, to bring them vividly to life in the reader's imagination, in specific forms, colors, shapes, sounds, scents–whatever the key sensations.
For a quick example of an autobiographical piece, read the Stanford commencement address presented by the late Steve Jobs, wherein he spoke of "connecting the dots," a thing that can be done only with hindsight, and by listening to one's heart and mind. He told three connected stories to illustrate some of what he'd learned about life: http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2011/10/05/steve-jobs-2005-stanford-commencement-address/
Two pieces you might also enjoy, one from the "Modern Love" column of the NYTimes, and another from the "Lives" in the Sunday Magazine:
Freewrites and Triggers for Invention/Drafting:
*Look at some old photographs of yourself and describe yourself as you were then, and any memories or changes of note.
*Make a list of your important "things" and accomplishments. Put the list in a grammatical sentence, with qualifying phrases and clauses. You might use it in the course of your essay as a collage or kaleidescope of colorful, moving images reflecting your world.
*Write a Lead (the journalistic term for the beginning of a piece of writing) to a question you find interesting:
Who are You?
Who were You?
What does it mean to grow up?
How does change begin? What does change look like?
Where have you got your ideas? Which have worked for you, and which have not?
Who or what was your biggest influence?
Who or what were the bringers of joy? Who loved you? Who did not love you?
What have you feared?
Where and how did you learn to feel independent, or not so? Secure and safe, or not so?
What does the work you have done reveal about you? About others?
*Body Mapping and Hand Mapping: Trace your body or your hand onto a blank canvas. Write a feeling or an aspect of your character on the different parts of your body or on each of your fingers. Use the surrounding blank area to jot memory associations–people, places, happenings.
*Write a short note or letter to yourself expressing one overwhelming or harsh truth about your life. Explore the source of this truth.
_____________________________
At the following URL is a list of topics anyone might use to get started on an essay, though not all suggest strictly narrative writing: http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/teaching-topics/teaching-topics-10-personal-writing-ideas/ I like this piece, under Lens Blog, which takes inspiration from photography: http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/in-the-shadows-of-wolves-and-man/
More Topic Suggestions:
Write a historical narrative about your family life (tying the present back to the past) or about your relationship with one particular family member or friend; include something of your hometown, exploring your roots and the ways in which family, place or community have shaped you. Include specific detail, dialogue, action, and descriptions of people and places and what it all means to you today.
Write about an early formative experience, or a series of, the effects of which were significant and that continue to resonate. It might be an account of meeting someone who changed your life, of losing something you never anticipated losing, an early achievement, and/or an early failure. It might be a realization about your own nature and how it shaped your sense of the life you would or might live. Work a description of who you are today into the past narrative account.
Describe or recount the history of something you own that takes you back to a significantly earlier period in your life and use that history to reveal something about yourself–memories, feelings, ideas, your character, desires, fears, etcetera. Rummage around your home, and ask what do I value most, what has power or an interesting story, just waiting to be told ( you of course are to be the central focus).
You might frame the essay in one or more of the following ways:
*A now-I-know-better experience.
*An experience that shows something of what people are made of, and of what you are made.
*An experience that shows the power of love, community, anger, desire, fear, loneliness, etcetera.
*An experience that brought about a significant change in you.
*An experience that reveals the kind of family you have and/or perhaps want to create.
*An encounter with a "stranger" you can't now forget.
Writing Assignment #2, rough due in class week 4:
In 500-700 words explore some element of your life in terms of both the past and present. Your life, your history, family, identity concerns, interests and pursuits, etcetera are the actual focus of the essay. Create a relatively sharp portrait of yourself and some revealing moment(s) or event that serves the narrative element.
The essay is due for review at the start of class next week: first-person point of view, organized around a conflict (personal story/theme) that extends from the present back into the past and back again to the present and to you today (you get to show some of your history). Some key reference (like the dress in "The Ordinary Miraculous" or the teapot in "The Dime-Store Teapot") might appear, as a symbol, a memento, a correlate of the theme(s) of your story.
Title the essay, double space the lines, indent for each paragraph.
------------------------Practice Work in Class (time permitting): (1) Paragraph about yourself modeled on the third-person opening paragraph of the article posted here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?hp ; (3) Sentence punctuation practice (handout).
------------------------Practice Work in Class (time permitting): (1) Paragraph about yourself modeled on the third-person opening paragraph of the article posted here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/20/magazine/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it-and-he-feels-fine.html?hp ; (3) Sentence punctuation practice (handout).
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