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Narrative Assignment

essay one: personal narrative

Description

• For your first essay, you�ll be writing a personal narrative � a non-fictional account of a single, crucial event in your life. This event should, of course, depict some significant moment related to your “theme:” the moment you discovered how crucial a role this object, habit, field, or activity plays in your life, or perhaps your most interesting memory attached to your theme (whether sad or happy, fascinating or disturbing, shocking or enlightening).
  • Do not analyze this single �theme� over the course of your entire life; for example, do not give me a summary of your lifetime of gymnastics or explain how gardening over the past four years became your obsession. Instead, focus on a particular moment, as tiny and concentrated as possible (usually, the space of a day, often only one or two hours, or, if you feel adventurous, maybe just a tiny instant of time when you experienced an epiphany).
• Whatever moment you choose to narrate, make sure it will interest your audience, which for this essay
  is your professors at PSU during this semester. Your goal is to create a favorable impression of yourself that will set you apart from the other thirty, fifty or two hundred students the professor will teach that semester.
  • With every sentence, consider these five to seven people: What do they like personally? Would they find this theme interesting? If not, how will you convince them that it is? What qualities do they look for in “good” students? How can you, through this story, convince them that you possess these qualities?

Meeting Your goal

• You need to perform a few basic tasks in order to create a successful narrative:
  • You must convince your audience of your theme’s unique, fascinating significance to your life.
    • Try to create an aura of glamor around your theme. Treat your theme as an exotic way of life that your professors should feel privileged to have a peek into!
    • Your theme, remember, is a certain way of life, right? It involves special skills, equipment, spaces, and even vocabulary, and it probably has its own particular code of ethics (rules for behavior). Pretend you are an anthropologist writing a book to introduce your colleagues to this “new” culture you have discovered.
  • You must entertain your audience, whether by making them laugh or provoking some kind of compelling emotional response (sadness, happiness, anger, remorse, etc.)
    • Humor = very powerful pathos!
    • Pain = very powerful pathos!
    • Before you write, try to identify the one or two emotions that will drive your essay. Choose your words to create this emotional atmosphere, especially your adjectives and adverbs.
  • You must create and maintain a personal voice in order to transmit your own personality.
    • Remember, your ulterior motive for this essay (every single linguistic utterance has an ulterior motive!): make your professors remember you as an individual.
    • Try to decide in advance two or three overarching qualities you want to project. Keep these in mind as you write.

Additional Considerations

• Good stories usually reveal a moment when the writer learned something new. What did you realize about life, about yourself, about your theme?
  • However, do not sound like a preacher, and try not to pick obvious lessons: try to avoid lecturing your audience on the virtues of teamwork, the need to appreciate your family, perseverance, charity, etc.
  • To avoid obvious moralizing:
    • 1) Be Specific.
      • Was it truly “teamwork” that saved you, or was it the fact that you and your partner had known each other since kindergarten and could practically read each other’s minds?
      • Was it really “charity” that led you to understand the significance or your theme to your life, or was it that you realized that sometimes, even people who look like they have everything need help from time to time.
      • Was it really “perseverance” that kept you on the path to success, or was it that you finally found a profitable place to dump your scary obsessive qualities where they wouldn’t hurt anyone?
    • 2) Show, Don’t Tell.
      • Instead of merely telling us, “That day, I truly learned how to appreciate my mother,” use yourself in character mode to demonstrate this change of heart.
      • Remember, you are not just the narrator, but a character in your own story!
      • For example, in the introduction, you could depict an average weekday morning, when your mother comes in to wake you up, says, “Good morning, sweetie,” and then offers to make you pancakes. Have yourself respond in a kind of mean manner: say, “God, Mom, why did you wake me up this early?” or “I told you yesterday I didn’t want pancakes. I stopped eating those months ago.” Then, late in your essay, perhaps in the conclusion, revisit that scene. Your mother comes in your room, wakes you up, and offers your breakfast, just like last time, except this time, you respond appreciatively. You wake up, and all of the sudden, you see your mother in a different light. Maybe you say that the morning light is resting around her head like a halo, or that the way she sat on the edge of your bed made you feel warm and comforted. Then, have your character say, “Thanks for getting me up, Mom. I really need extra time to study this morning. And I’m not sure I want pancakes, but if I asked nicely, would you make me some eggs instead?”
• You don’t have to tell the 100% truth.
  • Sure, this is non-fiction, but you can still play around a little.
  • For example, what if you have an interesting topic for this essay, but the story occurred over months? Well, just compress the events: have your character indulge in a “flashback” in the second paragraph that gives us all the background info we need, and then compress the rest of the events within a space of a day.
  • Let’s say that you have seven or eight different acquaintances who will have “speaking” roles in your essay. That’s too many for your reader to remember. Pretend that only two people were responsible for all of these lines.
  • Or let’s say that your story would sound more cohesive if the random person who made you feel bad about yourself that morning is, six hours later, actually present at the big game where you saved the day. And as you rush to the goal line, for a split second you see that person sitting in the stands, gaping, open-mouthed, as you make that game-winning score.
    • If this person does not exist, you could even make this person up! Making this person up saves you from having to say, “That day, I learned to believe in myself.” That sounds kind of boring and pretentious. Let someone else do the talking!
  • You may have to make up dialogue from the top of your head. Chances are, you don’t remember exactly what anyone said anyway.