ENGL467 Creative Writing Project 2: A Story from Personal Experience

Unavoidably, writers build their stories around their personal experiences. Where else does a writer go to find material to use in a story? Events writers experience in their daily lives find their way into stories as scenes or plots. Places a writer has visited show up as settings in the writer's stories. Characters in a writer's work are built on people the writer meets in her day-to-day activities. This character is built on the traits of someone a writer met once. That character is a blend of two eccentric uncles.

You face a risk of course, in making your characters too close to someone in real life or developing stories around events that your friends and relatives will recognize. If your objective is to write stories which are truthful and honest, then you may be forced, for the sake of your creative honesty, to tell a story that shows too many of the physical, moral, or philosophical moles on your friends' faces, and they may not appreciate your efforts. Perhaps that's why so many stories (in written or cinematic format) include a caveat that any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental. Still, while writers are careful not to implicate their friends and acquaintances in their writing, they have to build on what they know to create their work. And what they know will come from what they have experienced, or what they have discovered through rigorous research.

It is the first of these two avenues, personal experience, that serves as the framework for the second project. You'll be writing a story based on personal experience. The directions are simple.

1. Keep a journal for a period of time (a week, a day, a morning). Make the journal as complete as you can. Record everything you can possibly write down. Your thoughts, feelings, experiences. Write down people you encounter, things you do with them, things you talk about with them, conflicts you have with them.

2. At the conclusion of your specified period of time, review what you have written. What conflict has emerged? What conflict could you explore using the details you've written down? Perhaps the conflict comes from the past; perhaps it is something that you're looking forward to in the future. But you should be able to recognize in your material some human experience that is worth your attention in a story.

3. Give your analysis in step 2, design a plot for a story in which your character (based on yourself or someone else you wish to have as the central character) sets off to accomplish an objective, resolve a problem, or face a conflict. Use the details from your journal entry to write the story.

4. The story you write should be based on the material you write in your journal over the specified period of time. Do not write a story which comes entirely from a past experience. You may, if you wish, bring in past experiences and events in ways that help you develop the plot of your story, but the basic ingredients of the story must come from your journal entry for the specified period of time.

5. Have a draft of your story ready to read in small groups by Wednesday, October 8.

Let me illustrate the sort of thing you should find yourself writing. One of my students in a past version of this course kept a careful diary for a weekend during which she had what amounted to a blind date with someone in the south. I forget now how she met this individual, but it happened that she met a man who wanted to be better acquainted with her. He arranged to fly her to Virginia, set her up in nice bed and breakfast there, and spent the weekend trying to impress her. As the weekend progressed, she realized that she was not interested in any sort of long term relationship with this individual and let him know that this was the case. She used the details of this weekend to write her story. In the process of developing the story she created additional facts, additional characters, and additional scenes that she needed but the basic shape of the story centered around her weekend in Virginia.

Inevitably I have gotten the question, "What if nothing exciting happens to me? What do I write about?" Well, then you find a way to write about nothing. Most of us live lives that seem, on the surface, to have little consequence, but we still manage to find meaning. That's the essence of the existential experience, right? Look for the meaning in the experiences you record for the weekend. Build your story around these meanings.

If you have questions, don't hesitate to call or stop by the office, or post them to me by e-mail.

In the meantime, continue to write in your daily journal. Remember, if you are working toward a B or an A, you will be keeping a writer's diary or journal in which you write five times a week over the course of the semester.