Dr. P had us write about internship to launch the narrative project. Then, we went to the Vons shopping center near our school to pick a subject and make up a story about them and their life. My partner was Luz and we chose a lady that carried a big bottle of Rose and a pastry out of Vons, then dropped them off in her car and left. The weirdest part was that her car was still there 30 minutes after she dropped her groceries off.
My Baseline Essay
In my baseline essay I wrote about how I got my liscence. Looking back, I would probably tell myself to add more detail. Although I ended up changing the subject of my narrative, I wish I still had this rough draft perfected to the best of my ability in the moment.
How I Won The Right To The Streets Of Memphis
To work on the details and dialouge in our own narratives, we read "How I won the right to the streets of Memphis". We then created scenes from this piece and preformed it in front of the class. My group got assigned to the scene where the subject of the story's mom sends him to the store. We set it up so that the mom gave the basket for the groceries and the money to him as a right of passage.
Initial Story Ideas
My intital ideas were honestly, kind of lame. In the moment, I was stumped because I thought that nothing of great importance happened in my life, and that meant that I diddn't have anything to write about. When I taked with Dr.P about my concerns and feelings toward this narrative, he started asking me questions about how I grew up and that eventually led to me writing about how I was emo in the 8th grade.
Hero's Journey
I did not use a Hero's Journey at all in my piece. I think that some of the more action packed or dystopian books/novels center around A Hero's Journey because it is easy to write about. I wanted to challenge myself and create a unique piece of writing that was personal to me, so I left this out intentionally.
Shell Descriptions
We went into depth about descriptions and similies by describing shells. It was interesting at first because we wrote a short paragraph describing a shell as a group then we swapped descriptions with a group and had to guess which shell they described out of a handful of shells. We focused on describing shells for about a week and after a while it got really monotonous and boring. I wish we could have focused more on descriptive language for our own narratives than shells.
Thr process of writing this was a long one. Mostly because the class got sidetracked on how to write paragraphs and how to use descriptive language as well as dialouge. I wish we could have applied these skills to our personal narratives because for me at least, it would have made my piece better.
Writing my personal narrative was a bit of relief for me. Before I write this, it felt like I was bottling up these emotions and pushing them down rather than talking them out or finding an outlet to relieve these feelings. I am really proud of how my final piece came out because it was so personal to me and it represented one of the hardest times ive had to endure in my life.
This moment was when Dr. P chose to cut the exhibiton short, and we were breaking things down. Originally, Ana was supposed to read her narrative out loud last, but because Dr.P cut it short, she was not going to read. She was obviously upset because she was basically pushed aside and she was really proud of how hard she worked on her piece. So she got up and grabbed the microphone, turned it on and said "I am going to read my piece, you guys can listen or not I don't care."
I chose to highlight this as my golden moment because it was funny, heartbreaking, and inspiring all at once. Her boyfriend is the only one in the audience attentivly listening because we all were concerned with taking things down from exhibtion. She had the bravery to get up in front of everyone, who she knew were not paying attention, and chose to read her piece because she knew that she did a good job on it.