The formal assignment appears on Page 166 of your text, "Writing for Ideas and Practice 8-2":

1. Think of any of the moments in your experience when you have learned a great deal about who your are or how the world works--they need not be huge, life- altering moments; they can be quiet, even small moments, but ones with significance.

2. Record the experience as simply as possible, with as many specific sensory details as possible, so that at the end of the story the reader understands what you learned or experienced.

And for our purposes, polish the preceding drafting into an effective narrative account. Simple does not mean simplistic, so aim for sophistication, which requires unity and coherence.

Put into practice as well the literary devices on which you continue to practice with your poetry. And remember to include specific details, avoiding an overly abstract prose style.

Work to engage the reader.

Those of you who experiment with a prose poem already move in the direction of Creative Non-Fiction, that area you all actually worked on when you wrote your Focused Free Writing experiments earlier in the term.

For the next two weeks, you will experiment with Creative Non-Fiction, a topic on which the notes will elaborate this week in conjunction with "Writing Literary Nonfiction," Chapter 8 in your text, this week's assigned reading.

This week's writing assignment asks you to investigate once more--and not for the last time this term--your hidden head. Think of an experience that made you realize something--small, interesting, alarming, surprising--about yourself; you do not have to like what you discovered--using your best and most descriptive and emphatic prose, relate the account.

Now the goal of this exercise is not simply to recount an experience but to relate to the reader the episode's significance, with which, if the material gets presented in an effective manner, the reader will identify, just as you can appreciate what happened to Langston Hughes's short account of his religious "experience."

In other words, work to imply the big idea. And inasmuch as you write creatively, you can and should alter circumstances to emphasize the ideas you wish to convey--collapse time if necessary.

Aim for no more than three, double spaced pages--and two pages is fine.

In your own account, you will want to pick one or two scenes (and no more) on which to focus--Langston Hughes provides an excellent example; when you relate a significant scene, you will, in fact, slow the tempo a bit and elevate interest--use in this case, dialogue, which shows what happens.

Experiment with using these quotations, and check to see how other authors use these devices.

Note that you can feel the tempo change in Frank Conroy's selection from Stop Time in your text.

In other words, think of what important scene you want to elaborate on, choosing it because the scene in question emphasizes important material from your experience.

You will experiment here with "showing and telling," a significant feature of prose writing--the rhythm of the writing that I discussed in terms of your verses.

Barbara Smith offers a very nice perspective on the dramatic effect of showing instead of telling. To show is dramatic because the reader must infer from the dialogue what significance lies in an exchange between or among characters, a dominant impression, if you will, that your account implies. You will also find useful information and some instructive examples of the difference between showing and telling at this site.

To tell the reader that your friend tells lies, for example, is neither as effective nor as dramatic a strategy as presenting a scene in which the reader, through an exchange, realizes that the friend (or you) does not tell the truth.

When the reader learns though implication an essential bit of information, this process emphasizes the information and the ideas involved.

Remember, too, that if you present the account in an effective manner, you do not have to bang the reader over the head with the theme over an over.

And you do not have to reach for the great profound for material your reader will enjoy.

Simple experiences very often have profound effects on a person.

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Last Modified: 09/20/2009