A MOMENT IN TIME
For our first project in Humanities, we were asked to write a story about a moment in our lifetime that transformed us or made us who we are today. It was to be written in a brief narrative description. The story was to be exactly 1 page long. No more than 1 page no less than one page. The requirements we had for this project were 1 inch margins, single spaced, the letter size is 12 and the font is in Times New Roman.
One thing that I took away from this project was that everyone has a moment that changed their life forever. I learned how to take a normal story that I am "telling" and turn it into a visual piece of writing that my reader can picture in their mind. The ingredients for a strong story is to go beyond the five senses, comprehend peculiarity, put your best material in, but leave the kitchen sink in the kitchen. Make your audience laugh or make them cry, or both. Write a story that makes your audience feel what you were feeling at that time. Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. It is common to every known culture. It requires a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener. The brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature - a face, a figure, a flower - and in sound. It detects patterns in information. Stories are perceptible patterns. And in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to allocate that comprehension with others. Writing about your own experiences transforms stories because your experiences are one of a kind. Other people may have experienced what you have, but their story about it will be different because they were feeling different emotions. Though they experienced the same thing you did, they will not have the exact same story as you because they have a different way to tell this story. You will never find a book about something you experienced, with the same emotions you had at that time. I think narrative writing can help me grow as a writer in general because as I write more stories, the descriptive sensory detail will come to me naturally.
One thing that was difficult for me with my story was that I could not decide if I wanted to write a story about my mom's accident, or something else. This is difficult for me because my mom's accident transformed my life along with my whole family's life, and it made me who I am today. A strong, independent young woman. I wrote the story about my mom and then over one weekend, I wrote a whole other story. I chose to write another story because I felt like my first story about my mom was a little too personal. My second story was about an armoire that my mom had gotten for me for Christmas while I was with her, but she tricked me into thinking it was hers. One thing I would have liked to change about the way that I wrote my story, is the way I told it. You can visualize what is going on in my story, but at some parts of my story you can't.
Throughout this project, I grew as a person in a few ways. I realized understanding your own faults and accepting them while trying to fix them is the first part of growing up. It is not about the goal, it is about growing to be the person than can accomplish that goal. Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all, or by having everything happen all at once. It's frightening how one day, one moment, one event, can change your life completely. There are three things you can never recover in life: the word after it's said, the moment after it's missed, and the time after it's all gone. Be careful.
One thing that I took away from this project was that everyone has a moment that changed their life forever. I learned how to take a normal story that I am "telling" and turn it into a visual piece of writing that my reader can picture in their mind. The ingredients for a strong story is to go beyond the five senses, comprehend peculiarity, put your best material in, but leave the kitchen sink in the kitchen. Make your audience laugh or make them cry, or both. Write a story that makes your audience feel what you were feeling at that time. Anthropologists tell us that storytelling is central to human existence. It is common to every known culture. It requires a symbiotic exchange between teller and listener. The brain detects patterns in the visual forms of nature - a face, a figure, a flower - and in sound. It detects patterns in information. Stories are perceptible patterns. And in those patterns we find meaning. We use stories to make sense of our world and to allocate that comprehension with others. Writing about your own experiences transforms stories because your experiences are one of a kind. Other people may have experienced what you have, but their story about it will be different because they were feeling different emotions. Though they experienced the same thing you did, they will not have the exact same story as you because they have a different way to tell this story. You will never find a book about something you experienced, with the same emotions you had at that time. I think narrative writing can help me grow as a writer in general because as I write more stories, the descriptive sensory detail will come to me naturally.
One thing that was difficult for me with my story was that I could not decide if I wanted to write a story about my mom's accident, or something else. This is difficult for me because my mom's accident transformed my life along with my whole family's life, and it made me who I am today. A strong, independent young woman. I wrote the story about my mom and then over one weekend, I wrote a whole other story. I chose to write another story because I felt like my first story about my mom was a little too personal. My second story was about an armoire that my mom had gotten for me for Christmas while I was with her, but she tricked me into thinking it was hers. One thing I would have liked to change about the way that I wrote my story, is the way I told it. You can visualize what is going on in my story, but at some parts of my story you can't.
Throughout this project, I grew as a person in a few ways. I realized understanding your own faults and accepting them while trying to fix them is the first part of growing up. It is not about the goal, it is about growing to be the person than can accomplish that goal. Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all, or by having everything happen all at once. It's frightening how one day, one moment, one event, can change your life completely. There are three things you can never recover in life: the word after it's said, the moment after it's missed, and the time after it's all gone. Be careful.