Today's Prompts, Inspired by Sheffield, and Some Lessons Learned about Writing

Write about the first song you ever became obsessed with, and talk a bit about your relationship with it then, and your relationship with it now.

OR

Write about an experience where you went somewhere else for a limited but extended time (summer camp, a semester or year at another school or in another country, a brief stint living in another state or attending another school) and temporarily became another person (or became part of a new and different culture).

* * *

I've compiled some of the comments you wrote for the first day of class, about your writing successes and failures and what you've learned from them. Some common themes emerge: we write better when we actually have something to say, that we care about, that interests us, and that feels worth sharing. Procrastination creates more problems than it solves, and it's not easy to BS your way through a discussion of a topic you know little about. Writing about a topic--maybe especially when it's a struggle and a challenge--entails learning a lot about that topic. And a number of you struggled to write about Paradise Lost in particular!

"Failures"

I thought I had a good idea, but in the end my ideas became scrambled and what I produced didn't make any sense at all.

I waited until the weekend before reading the book I was supposed to write a research paper about, due that Monday. Instead of reading the book I just skimmed it, and tried to piece together an essay from the few chapters I had read. It ended up being awful to write (and an awful paper in the end) because I had only a very rudimentary understanding of the book, and only a day and a half to write it.

Sometime during fourth grade, I was assigned my first big essay. Since I was so young, my mother, sister, and father took it upon themselves to help me write my essay. Rather than learning some of the fundamental aspects of writing, I allowed my family to, in essence, write my essay for me. . . . [B]y the time the next essay came around, I was in a pretty bad predicament.

The prompt asked me to "describe diversity" and essentially "show what it meant to me." I thought this would be easy since diversity is a big influence in my life and so I began writing. The reason it was one of my biggest failures was that by the end of the night I finished and read over what I had done, and I realized I had written a complete cliche. The essay was tasteless, anyone could have written it, and I realized every point I made was broad, vague, and totally separate from who I was. I restarted the next day from scratch and eventually ended up with a solid piece, but the draft was disappointing and really showed me what made a good essay good.

This summer, I was determined to write my Common Application essay and make it the best thing I've ever written. It didn't seem like it would be too hard; after all, it is an essay about ~myself~ and very open-ended in topic. But I couldn't think of a topic for a month. I looked up prompts, tried writing other things to cure writer's block, but nothing worked. After a month of thinking, I decided just to write it. It was probably the product of 3-4 nights of work, and I thought it was decent. I got it peer-reviewed, and I realized what I had written was awful. The reader thought it was cliche and rereading it, it seemed a little inauthentic and pretty cringeworthy in general.

I thought that I had developed a strong and interesting central claim. However, as I continued to write I struggled to expand upon my main ideas. I decided to continue writing about the topic I chose, but the final product felt incomplete. I would like to have thought more deeply about the points and how to explicate them more thoroughly.

My largest writing failure was probably when I had to find similarities between two readings that I had neglected. It was how "Goblin Market" and Paradise Lost were similar. It was my largest failure because of not only had I not understood the readings but how I was going to put ideas on paper. I also had problems finding good ways to transition between the two poems. I was using "which is like" or "which relates to" almost 50 times in the paper. Not to mention the fear of having to write a paper I wasn't prepared for made me procrastinate more than usual.

I feel like the essays that I wrote for African-American Literature fell through at the earliest stages, during the planning and outlining section. From there, I had trouble connecting my ideas and fleshing them out, which led for them to be disconnected, confusing essays.

"Successes"

I was pleased with how my research and note-taking transitioned to the essay. I kept having to restructure and rearrange sentences because a lot of the data had to be listed and explained. I learned a lot about Flint and water from writing this essay as well.

It was the process of thinking about what we were learning, forming arguments and transforming my ideas into a polished piece of writing that made the experience enjoyable.

I was in fourth grade when a poem I wrote was published in an anthology with works of other grade school students. Even though now I don't regard my poem as anything close to impressive, the moment I flipped through the anthology and found my poem, I felt really proud of what I had done.

While at the start of the essay, I didn't feel I knew much about what I was writing about, by the end (after a revision attempt) I felt I knew the book and my essay back to front.

The assignment was to use a popular-media source to explain/show a social issue at the time it was produced. I chose to write about "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" in relation to the gap between the black working and upper classes. I had a lot of fun researching, which I believe showed on the page.

Last year we wrote two essays on different novels and were given a prompt to tie these novels together somehow. I think this was one of my biggest successes in writing because I found an important connection between the two novels and I was able to explain in detail the differences. I think I did an especially good job in using quotes from the texts to strengthen my argument. Of course, I went through many drafts of this essay to try and better my writing.

My best piece of writing was something I wrote last year in Creative Writing. It was a story about my past but with a twist. It was in second person and I tried to convey it like a child.

My biggest success was creating an article on lower income students. The fact that this was a little-talked-about topic kept the sense of urgency important. I kept a steady pace of interviews, research, and writing for several weeks, which I was extremely proud of. Not only that, but I was discussing an incredibly significant and topical issue. Rather than arguing theoretically, I had real-world facts and first-hand accounts.

One of my biggest writing successes was actually a parody of The Two Towers by J.R.R. Tolkein for my sixth-grade English class. It was a bunch of really terrible puns and dumb cringey jokes, but I just remember it being super fun to write and it didn't feel like an assignment. I think it ended up being about 20 pages long, which was the longest thing I had and have ever written, and I'm pretty sure I got a really good grade on it. But it was also the first time I had ever really gone "above and beyond" for a school assignment and enjoyed it the whole time.

My biggest writing success was during sophomore year. My essay was about the folly of Eve in Paradise Lost. This was one of the first times that I was interested in the subject matter and found connecting all the evidence together to push my point across as a very stimulating challenge. I put a lot of time into the essay and even thought of a title that I thought was interesting and would provoke the casual reader. "Eve's Emotional Folly" was one of the few essays that I thought was kinda good before I turned it in; ironically enough I don't remember the grade I received.

Writing Day: Tuesday, September 29

Five minute quick-write:

How do you feel about your name?

If your personal essay is already under way with a topic or direction you feel excited about, write for the rest of the period, developing your ideas and beginning to or continuing to shape an essay.

If you are still having trouble deciding on a direction to take in your essay or a way to focus in on a topic, consider Phillip Lopate’s observation that one important path toward engaging your audience is to understand that your story can “serve to elucidate a more widespread human trait and make readers feel a little less lonely and freakish.”  Consider a moment, a period, or an experience in your life where you felt “lonely and freakish,” and consider how you might draw on that. What made you feel less that way? Or, if you’re still in the midst of feeling that way, what are your thoughts on why you feel this way and how you might overcome that? And/or, what can you take from that experience, whether it is in your past or in your present?

With that in mind, expand on the “How do you feel about your name?” prompt, revisit the “Have you ever or do you feel ‘split at the root’?” prompt, or begin to work on some particular path that the contemplation of “lonely and freakish” leads you down.

Some Sheffield-Related Links and Allusions Explained

The essay we're reading for tomorrow (in the Green Packet), a chapter from Rolling Stone music critic Rob Sheffield's excellent book of personal nonfiction Talking to Girls about Duran Duran, contains a number of specific references to music and popular culture in the 1980s. Each chapter is titled after and arranged around a specific song; in this case, it's OMD's "Enola Gay" (which I'd wager most of you are unlikely to be familiar with). Uni High's resident expert on 1980s popular culture, Dr. Elizabeth Majerus, has helpfully assembled some links to videos and a classic clip from the movie Airplane! that might help you make sense of all these references:

http://emajerus.blogspot.com/2017/08/some-rob-sheffield-related-links.html

You are not required to check out all of these, but they are provided as a supplement to the essay, in case your curiosity is aroused.

Some Introduction to Fitzgerald, and Today's Writing Prompt

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up" (Lopate Packet 31-34)

When this essay was first published, in Esquire magazine in three installments (February, March, and April 1936), it was not generally well-received among critics, who objected to its candid personal revelations. (Later readers have come to admire the essay for precisely the same reasons.) Fitzgerald was one of the most gifted, famous, and successful young novelists of his generation. He made an international name for himself with The Great Gatsby in 1925, but his wife Zelda's very public struggles with mental illness (she was permanently placed in a hospital in 1936, the year of this essay) and his own extreme abuse of alcohol led to the "crack-up" that he so candidly describes here. Fitzgerald would die at the age of forty-five, four years after this essay was written.

William Ernest Henley “Invictus” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182194

William Wordsworth, “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ode-intimations-immortality-recollections-early-childhood

“Nerves” in 1936 referred more generally to mental health and psychology (as in "nervous breakdown" or "neurosis").

Cave Canem: “Beware of the dog”

Prompt for Today:

Think of a time in the past when you did something that you weren't embarrassed or regretful about at the time, but now feel embarrassed or regretful about looking back. What changed? Reflect on this. (If you want, you can finish your "a time you were embarrassed and shouldn't have been" writing from earlier this week instead of starting on this new prompt.)

Essay 1: The Personal Essay

Yesterday in class I formally assigned your first essay. The assignment sheet includes a range of advice for getting started, generating ideas about what kind of subject you'd like to take on, and what you might say about it. As Kurt Vonnegut reminds us, in "How to Write with Style," no one will care how good your style is if you don't have something interesting and compelling to say in the first place. We will be talking about sentence-level writing--using language as precisely and artfully as possible to give shape and voice to your ideas and observations--but for those sentences to work, you need to, as Vonnegut puts it, "Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about."

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

In-class writing prompt for Wed., 8/23

10 minutes:

Recall a time when you were extremely embarrassed at the moment, and looking back now, feel that you need not have been embarrassed. Reflect on this. What would you say to your younger self about this situation and/or your reaction?

When you're finished with this prompt, share your favorite Woolf sentence on this Google Doc (give the page number and your initials in parentheses). Once you've written your favorite sentence, as an exercise, see if you can find a "thesis" for this essay.

Truman Capote on Virginia Woolf: "From the point of view of the ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence."

Some Examples of Nonfiction Blogs Past

Today we will look at some examples of some blogs from earlier incarnations of this course, to give you an idea of the variety of topics and viable approaches you might take to this assignment. We'll be accessing these through Majerus's Nonfiction blog:

https://emajerus.blogspot.com/2016/08/a-few-blogs-by-former-nfw-students.html

Welcome to Nonfiction Writing

Welcome to Nonfiction Writing! This blog will serve as the primary portal through which you will access and peruse one another's blogs. I will make all class materials available here for viewing or download, and I will post all in-class prompts and other activities.

The general Course Description and the first installment of the Syllabus (which takes us through the first essay) are available, as is this general overview of the Blog assignment. You can access the general guidelines for the Writer's Notebook here.

For Thursday, August 17's in-class writing, the following prompt was given:

Write about a time you realized that you loved something you thought you hated. Or a time you realized that you hated something you thought you loved.

For Friday, August 18's reading of "Split at the Root," by Adrienne Rich, you had a choice between two prompts:

Have you ever "flirted with identity"? How, and with what result? (See p. 645 of Rich for her reference to "flirting with identity.")

Have you ever felt, or do you feel, "split at the root"? How? And how have you or are you dealing with this, if at all? (And if not, reflect on that.)

For Monday, August 21 (Peter Selgin, "Confessions of a Left-Handed Man"), those of us who were not in the Path of Totality responded to the following prompt:

If you have a sibling: How has your relationship with your sibling (or siblings, or one particular sibling) affected your sense of your self and/or the shape of your life? Do you thing you define yourself in relation to or in contrast to your sibling(s), and if so, has that been more positive or negative, or a complicated mix of positive and negative? 

If you don't have a sibling: How has being an "only child" shaped your sense of yourself and/or the way others seem to see you? (And, possibly, how do you feel about the phrase "only child"?) In what ways do you like being the only kid in your family, and do you ever wish you had siblings?

And that pretty much brings us up to speed. Please note that since you didn't yet have the Writer's Notebook guidelines, you aren't required to answer these soon-to-be routine prompts for the Rich essay (Friday, 8/18). These prompts should become Standard Operating Procedure as the starting point for notebook entries, beginning with Monday's reading of the Selgin essay.