Writing in an Age of Spin, Fall 2009

Where I Come From

For this assignment, I’d like you to write an autobiographical essay or narrative that lets us get to know you better by introducing us to the world you grew up in. It will give you practice in the techniques of narrative, which will be of use when you get to the next assignment—the investigative familiar essay. It will allow you to tap further into your own experiences and try to convey them authentically. The key here is to give us, as closely as possible, a sense of the way your world, or some part of it, really was. Here you’ll want to establish a clear voice, because we’ll learn a lot simply by how you talk to us. And we’ll learn more about you and the characters who populate your world if you give us scenes in which these characters appear and interact.

You might begin by writing, or telling, about a character or event or family ritual—what always happens at the dinner table, say—or simply some moment that seems especially vivid. Try to develop a scene or two.
I can’t tell you what shape your narrative or essay will take any more than you can at this point. But as you go, the answers to these questions should come clear:

Are you writing “pure” narrative or are you choosing to use your personal experience to reflect more generally and explicitly on some issues that it raises in the form of the familiar essay?
What is the tension that drives the story or essay forward?
How will the narrative or essay be organized? Will you link together a series of scenes in which the story unfolds or will you stick to one extended scene?
How much talking to the reader will you do, offering commentary and summarizing what happens in between scenes you choose to highlight?
What will we learn of significance about your experience, and how will this emerge?

As you write, remember to keep hold of your narrator’s voice and your narrator’s intent—always writing to clarify for yourself and the reader the way things really are or were, and pulling out what’s important and vital to you about the experiences you are describing. At some point, you might try directly freewriting on the questions: “What’s most interesting here? What am I trying to tell?” What you freewrite may not appear at all in your final narrative, but it can help you clarify what you want to focus on and what insight you’re aiming towards.

You should be looking for connections, for relationships between the scenes and characters and commentary, seeing what emerges as you bring these various elements together, combining them into a whole, abandoning some, and choosing others to expand upon. Let this process guide you in shaping your writing as it evolves towards expressing something true about the world you come from and your experience within it.